Jade Thirlwall Review: Pop's Quirkiest Star Transcends Manufactured Past
With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least one single including a cameo by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.
A Unique Journey
It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create 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 deeply odd, jolting and disjointed melange 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 proves, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as her debut single: 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; the show is extended with a cover of the Madonna classic 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
But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.
A Charming Performer
The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic figure: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are here in force, she proposes showing appreciation by including a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.
What Lies Ahead
It may well end the way these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the fact that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that was released just a month ago makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.
Jade performs at the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.
