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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow predictable patterns – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least one single featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and disjointed melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

As the set on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not every song on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by exactly the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that present a nearly discordant 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 metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while the track 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 a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that every attendee appear 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 final Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.