Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – 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 lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time in the years before the inevitable reunion tour.
It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject to the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual. She opened her solo account with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.
As the set on her first solo tour proves, not everything 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 also standard-issue disco pop driven by exactly the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.
But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that are offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She dedicates Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind. The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.
It may well end the way these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are back – but the fact the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to an album that only came out a month ago makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.
Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK until 23 October.
