Jade Live Show Analysis: The Music World's Quirkiest Artist Transcends Manufactured Past

With the exception of Harry Styles, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature mainstream-approved smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

A Superb Debut

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

As the set on her first solo tour demonstrates, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; the show is extended with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar 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 the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she suggests thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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