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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least one single featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards “grownup” mainstream-approved smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers 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 debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She dedicates Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, delightfully authentic presence: she is, she states at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them 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 expressed in the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that the original group 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 month ago makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing 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 Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK through October 23rd.