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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, including loudly underlining that she's free from 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 collaboration 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 usual.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series proves, not everything on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that present a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, 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 including a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are reunited – but the fact that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that only came out a month ago makes you wonder. 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 domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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