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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – judging by tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the merchandise stall is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent 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 first solo tour proves, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally 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 medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, delightfully authentic figure: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by including a official undergarment to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that the original group are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

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