Jade Thirlwall Live Show Analysis: The Music World's Quirkiest Star Rises Above Manufactured Origins
With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least a track including a guest appearance by an American rapper, 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 enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.
A Unique Journey
It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by former Little Mix member 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 free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair the group 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 her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and fragmented melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.
As the set on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not everything 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 precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley 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 melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant brand of funk or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.
A Charming Performer
The artist on stage is a immensely likable, delightfully authentic figure: she is, she announces at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are here in force, she proposes thanking them by including a official undergarment to the merch stand.
Future Possibilities
It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement 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 an album that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And should it occur, the final Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.
Jade performs at the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is touring the UK through October 23rd.
