Jade Thirlwall Live Show Analysis: Pop's Quirkiest Artist Transcends TV-Created Past

With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least a track including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and disjointed mixture of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not everything on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She dedicates Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are back – but the reality that every attendee appear word-perfect as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the final Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade performs at the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom through October 23rd.