JADE at Mighty Hoopla review: Already the stuff of main pop girl legend

“It’s no Saturdays megamix…” quipped Jade Thirlwall onstage at London’s Mighty Hoopla yesterday, after an energetic, top-tier Little Mix medley that sent Brockwell Park into meltdown. A stand-up comic couldn’t have scripted a better, more perfectly contextualised joke: no shade to the Saturdays, whose back catalogue is near-unsurpassed in quality; it’s just the world-conquering, 10-year-spanning oeuvre of Little Mix is simply unparalleled.

In less capable hands, this whistle-stop store of the band’s best moments – ‘Sweet Melody’, ‘Touch’, ‘Shout Out To My Ex’; she earlier performers fan favourite ‘Wasabi’ in its entirety – all reworked so as to sound fresher, but with the lightest of touches so as not to taint their essence, might have overshadowed the rest of the set. A plausible Little Mix reunion certainly would have done. Jade, however, is a straight A student of pop, and intentional in everything she does. Her cowgirl outfit was a nod to the Supremes’ Diana Ross, for heaven’s sake.

Thus, this was a statement of solo star power, and possibly the most exciting moment Hoopla has ever seen.

Exhaustive choreo, grand, futuristic production and Adele-level charisma between songs – we could listen to Jade say “Houplah!” in Geordie twang all day long – this was a big, big swing, and in the end, more than the sum of its parts. It’s hard to believe the nine-song set was so short, and that we were in a park in south London. It felt like we were in an arena with the roof blown off.

You could almost sense the collective support of girl band members gone solo before her – Destiny’s Child, the Spice Girls, the Sugababes – propelling her forward. Although, unlike many of these women, Jade is going decidedly against the grain, and what she has to offer is all the more compelling for it. “If I don’t win, I’m in the bin, you say you never knew me, but when I pop off you sue me,” she sang on chaotic first single ‘Angel of My Dreams’, with an arch self-awareness suggesting that, actually, if she measures success on her own terms, she can’t lose. And so, like that one daring member of many a girl band, she’s charting a course that’s miles left of centre. This zany, unpredictable set – club-ready visuals Charli XCX would approve of; dancers in tutus regardless of gender; walls of electronic sound flipping to a cappella moments – reflected that choice. 

For all the bells and whistles, however, it’s the technical prowess of Jade’s voice – think Disney Princess gone rogue – that impresses most. She flaunts full-throated volume on ‘FUFN’ but sends an eerie hush across the 60,000-strong crowd with her operatic control on a soaring cover of Madonna’s ‘Frozen’. (Who else would dare?!) As for that complicated Sandie Shaw ‘Puppet on a String’ vocal run on ‘Angel of My Dreams’ – it’s even better live. (Again, who else would dare?!) 

She played one unreleased song, ‘Plastic Box’, but we were whipped into too much of a frenzy to make mental notes about it, except to say it slams. We really couldn’t be more excited for Jade’s upcoming album That’s Showbiz Baby, for her music has an essentially queer sensibility: rather than trying to appeal to everyone, it appeals to a minority. A cool, intelligent, edgy, kind, ascended minority, if we do say so ourselves. And while the LGBTQ community is not solely that minority, we definitely make up a large swathe of it. We embrace her, she embraces us, and so last night the love-in brought Jade to tears. The energy was off the scale.

Her allyship remains unmatched: nothing could have prepared us for the moment when, while leading a chant to introduce the F-bomb-tastic ‘FUFN’, she called out JK Rowling. It was a rock star moment that made the hair on the back of the arms stand on end. The backbone and the grit of this woman, when so many of us are running scared and feeling the walls closing in on us, when so many of our allies are losing their nerve, is breathtaking.

It’s superhero stuff in the vein of Judy Garland in the 70s and Madonna in the 80s and 90s, and won’t be forgotten.