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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – 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 move into “grownup” 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 prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. 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 no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – 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 song line from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her first full-length release 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 typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; the show is extended with a cover of the Madonna classic 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.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that present a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music 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.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she is, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes showing appreciation by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the way such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that the original group are back – but the reality that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to an album that was released just a month ago causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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