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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become 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 ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – based on the audience this evening, the most popular item on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her first solo tour proves, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she states at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that the original group are back – but the reality that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a month ago causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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