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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least one single including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become 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 oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – based on the audience this evening, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her first solo tour demonstrates, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, 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 suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, delightfully authentic figure: she declares, she announces at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she suggests showing appreciation by including a official undergarment to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are back – but the fact that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to an album that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.