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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a move into mature mainstream-approved smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not everything on her first full-length release That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation 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. Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the thrilling strain of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she announces at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her LGBTQ+ fanbase, 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 typically finish – the hostility towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are reunited – but the fact that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that only came out a month ago makes you wonder. And should it occur, the final Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester this evening and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.