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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least one single including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in engaging in the typical activities 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 factory-produced music business – judging by the audience this evening, the most popular item on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but regardless, 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 Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance on her first solo tour demonstrates, 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 also standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms 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 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 Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are here in force, she proposes thanking them by adding a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the fact that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.