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With the exception of Harry Styles, individual artistic journeys of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into “grownup” mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, including emphatically stating that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance on her first solo tour proves, not everything on her first full-length release 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 equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation 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 where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that present a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She offers the track Unconditional to her mother: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she proposes showing appreciation by including a official undergarment to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end 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 declare that the original group are back – but the fact that the entire audience appear word-perfect as they sing along to an album that only came out a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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