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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track including a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and fragmented mixture of big pop balladry, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her first solo tour proves, 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 extremely memorable, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that present a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes showing appreciation by adding a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they sing along to a record that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path 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 touring the UK until 23 October.