Jade Review: The Music World's Quirkiest Artist Transcends TV-Created Origins
Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – 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 reunion tour.
A Unique Journey
It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.
A Superb Debut
She launched her individual career with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.
As the set on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.
More Intriguing Material
However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that present a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mother: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.
An Appealing Presence
The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.
What Lies Ahead
It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that the original group are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to a record that was released just a month ago makes you wonder. And even if it does, the final Angel Of My Dreams underlines 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 Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.