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With the exception of Harry Styles, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least one single featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make 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 her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by exactly the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that present a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired 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 woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she announces at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she proposes showing appreciation by adding a official undergarment to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the hostility towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are back – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to an album that was released just a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the domain 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.