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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into “grownup” mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

This common scenario that renders the unconventional route currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are wont to do, including emphatically stating 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 fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts 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: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it features a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects 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 suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she announces at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a official undergarment to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are back – but the reality that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that only came out a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK through October 23rd.