Jade Thirlwall Review: The Music World's Quirkiest Star Transcends TV-Created Past

Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, including loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her first solo tour proves, 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 equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Supremes sample the name implies; the show is extended with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of nineties club anthems, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the way these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to declare that the original group are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience appear word-perfect as they sing along to an album that only came out a month ago makes you wonder. And should it occur, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade performs at the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK until 23 October.