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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards mature mainstream-approved smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – based on the audience this evening, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance 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 that: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Motown musical snippet the name implies; things are padded out with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster begins 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, delightfully authentic figure: 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 official undergarment to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that the original group are back – but the reality that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to a record that only came out a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And should it occur, 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 this evening and is traveling across the United Kingdom through October 23rd.