Jade Review: Pop's Most Unique Star Transcends TV-Created Past

With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least one single including a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

A Unique Journey

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, among them loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, 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 That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She dedicates Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while the track 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 a certain moment, “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.

Future Possibilities

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And should it occur, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.