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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that renders the unconventional route thus far followed by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – judging by tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her first solo tour demonstrates, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: the track 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; things are padded out with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

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 offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mother: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while 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 immensely likable, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; 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 manner such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are reunited – 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 few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

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