Jade Thirlwall Review: The Music World's Most Unique Star Rises Above TV-Created Origins

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 more edgy urban music style, replete with at least a track including a cameo by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, 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 currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her first solo tour demonstrates, not everything on her first full-length release That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; the show is extended with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mother: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. 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 the electroclash genre, 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 hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she proposes showing appreciation by including a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are back – but the fact that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a month ago makes you wonder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

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