Jade Review: Pop's Quirkiest Artist Transcends Manufactured Origins
With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture 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 including a cameo by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.
An Idiosyncratic Path
This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are wont to do, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.
An Impressive First Single
She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and fragmented mixture of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.
During the performance on her initial individual concert series proves, not everything on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; the show is extended with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a medley of nineties club anthems, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.
Additional Fascinating Content
But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that present a borderline atonal brand of funk or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She dedicates Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster begins like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.
An Appealing Presence
The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she states at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.
What Lies Ahead
It could conclude the way such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to declare that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a month ago causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.
Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is touring the UK through October 23rd.
