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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete 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 visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and disjointed melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance on her first solo tour demonstrates, not every song on her first full-length release That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented 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 medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the thrilling strain of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she suggests showing appreciation by including a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are reunited – but the reality that every attendee appear 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 Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.