Jade Thirlwall Review: The Music World's Quirkiest Star Rises Above Manufactured Past

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 – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years 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 engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, including emphatically stating that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – based on the audience this evening, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but regardless, 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 her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange 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 every song on her debut album 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 also standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; the show is extended 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 N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She dedicates Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to announce that the original group are back – but the fact that the entire audience seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a month ago causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is touring the UK through October 23rd.