The prima ballerina of Powell and Pressburger's 1948 film The Red Shoes does not dance because she wants to. Well, she initially wanted to, but she dances because the shoes demand it. Once fastened to her body, they transform the act of performance into exquisite captivity—her feet propel with terrifying external will, flinging her across stages, across cities, across the fragile boundary between devotion and annihilation. The shoes are unconcerned with the ballerina’s survival. Their sole imperative is that she continues to move. 

At the film’s demented crux, the theatre dissolves entirely. The stage expands into infinity. The audience disappears, leaving only the dancer and the compulsion. As the ballet master Boris Lermontov remarks offhandedly: “Oh, in the end, she dies.” The pointe shoes, in all their red technicolor glory, remain intact. They wait patiently. There will always be another girl.

The machinery of popstardom fastens itself to a girl early on. It postures her, feeds her applause like oxygen. And when the time comes, if she is very lucky, she learns how to unlace herself without forgetting how to dance. 

Jade Thirlwall has survived this dance before.

Now performing mononymously, JADE, the 33-year-old pop star, exists in the rare and precarious state of a pop reincarnate. The South Shields native is at the inception of a solo career and functionally in her second decade as a global performer. Her solo debut offering released last September, THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!, operates as a campy, glitter-bombed post-mortem in which JADE dissects the conditions under which she was first assembled.

JADE was birthed into public consciousness via the composite organism that was Little Mix: the 2010s British-Pop girl group composed of Thirlwall, Perrie Edwards, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, and Jesy Nelson at the hands of The X Factor (UK) whose decade-long tenure atop global pop constituted a minor miracle. Girl groups are designed for combustion. They flare ever so brightly, then fragment under the structural pressures of visibility. Little Mix proved indestructible against all industrial logic and historical pop precedent, paving the structural, commercial way for the pop girl groups of the 2020s: KATSEYE, TWICE, BLACKPINK.

The fragments of Little Mix remain chummy as ever (the door has been left ajar for a reunion, at least on JADE’s behalf: “IT’S A FUCKING HIATUS!” she exclaimed after seeing Perrie and Leigh-Anne in the middle of a show last August). To the average former member of an internationally-recognized pop group, it is considered gauche to ever acknowledge previous band participation, opting for an amnesiatic attitude towards this heritage. So, when I ask JADE what exactly compels her to reject this solo-ascension-induced ambivalence, she responds with disarming simplicity: “I’m just insanely proud of what me and the girls achieved. It’s so hard for a girl band to do well, and for us to have lasted as long as we did—like a decade—it’s no easy feat in the music industry, especially for a pop girl group. Why wouldn’t I be excited to embrace that?”

It was an inevitability, then, that JADE’s debut album would circle her music industry rearing. The album is preoccupied with the pleasures and perversions of performance—and the elusive emotional contract that occurs when a woman agrees to become visible for a living. Influenced by the theatrical maximalism of Madonna and the emotional dramaturgy of Motown, THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! narrates dependency: the high of hearing your name screamed back at you in a dark room. The psychic recalibration that occurs when external affirmation is inextricable from internal worth. The album’s deluxe counterpart, THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! THE ENCORE extends this autopsy—“Church” as a love letter to her LGBTQIA+ fans, “This Is What We Dance For” as a confession of the enduring anxieties that accompany music industry tenure.

“I think pop stars would be unwilling to admit how addicted they are to it,” she says. “You do get addicted to that sort of praise. I don’t necessarily enjoy being famous—I don’t enjoy not being able to walk around unnoticed—but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love hearing fans scream, or sing the songs back to me.”

More than anything, THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! occupies the unstable middle ground familiar to anyone who has loved something that has also harmed them. In that sense, then we find ourselves again at the aforementioned dependency. The album’s lead single, “Angel of My Dreams,” indelibly stabs at this dependency, in lyrics she describes as both “tragically honest and desperate.” “The music industry consumed my life,” she recounts, as though JADE were confiding in me about an ex. “I’ve made many sacrifices to be part of it. I had many relationships when I knew I’d never put that person before music. Music has been the love of my life. And, you know, like any toxic relationship, there are good and bad points to it.”

This dynamic—the oscillation between autonomy and submission—is formally refracted in THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!’s sonic architecture. The album deliberately sprawls between genres, resisting cohesion in favor of emotional accuracy. “Angel of My Dreams” begins in a state of beatific illusion, its opening passages lush and devotional before bait-and-switching the listener, resulting in an indelible sonic overstim. “Fantasy,” its libidinally excessive counterpoint, indulges fully in escapism’s narcotic pleasures. It luxuriates in the artificiality of desire in its pure, rhapsodic pop elements.

JADE’s unwavering love for the industry, in spite of it all, is palpable as she reintroduces herself in the Americas. Her headlining tour, framed around the classical theatres she is currently performing in, is structured as a variety program in which she is, delightfully, every act: cabaret chanteuse, disco evangelist, slapstick comic, messianic figure delivering her nightly “Evita moment” to a gaggle of girls and gays from a balcony. Her theatre literacy is derivative of an upbringing steeped in Cabaret, West Side Story, and A Chorus Line. When THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! crystallized as a concept, the staging followed naturally: “I knew I was doing theaters, so I was like, how can we create a show that embodies the ethos of the album but also has that chaos? I’m aware I’m not humongous yet,” she says, “so it was about making it feel as expensive and considered as possible.”

JADE’s theatrical multiplicity is contingent on her acute understanding of the industry. If this toxic relationship has taught her anything, it’s how to survive, over a decade in: “I think to be a good pop star, you have to be a chameleon,” she tells me. “You have to adapt to the times…a good pop star knows their fans more than anyone else. It’s not just the music—it’s the choreo, the staging, the costumes, the personality. There are so many moving parts, which is why pop is one of the hardest genres to have any longevity in.”

“Being in the music industry is quite savage,” she continues. “When you understand that and you can play the game to your advantage, that’s when you clock it.”

This understanding—the music industry’s underlying mechanics, its artificialities, its cyclical appetite for reinvention—has informed her crossing of the pond as she embarks on her North American tour. “It does feel like I’m starting again,” she says, “but I know who I am now…my scope of success is different.” 

JADE’s reception in the States—particularly within queer spaces—has been immediate and fervent. She tells me she completely did not expect this outpour of support, effectively shocking this LA-native journalist; I tell JADE that her songs frequently spill out of rideshare speakers and West Hollywood dance floors and that it is hard to come by a conversation in which she is not rendered as Mother. She is both elated and amused by this news: “The gays are out in full force.”

It is a shift in audience that ultimately lent itself to JADE’s sensibilities. Camp theatricality, self-aware melodrama, and the innate concept of identity as performance are queer logics, which JADE has long been fluent in. So fluent, in fact, that she marked the release of her single, “Fantasy” with a bundle of tongue-in-cheek ephemera—equipping the fanbase with Fantasy-branded butt plugs, anal beads, and blindfolds galore. It is safe to say that JADE has taken the shift swimmingly. Simultaneously, she finds that many OG Mixers have returned to the barricade to bear witness to the return of the Messiah.

“Over here in the US,” she says, “I get fans telling me, ‘I can’t believe you’re finally here—we’ve been waiting since, like, 2011 for the headline turn.’ I get it, and I feel it too. But it’s also cool that there are so many people at the shows who didn’t really know Little Mix and love me just as a solo artist. I’m happy with all of it—the old fans and the new.” 

It is, after all, that this amalgam of a following has capacitated countless her first headline tour—Mixers clutching decade-old memories and 20-somethings encountering her for the first time under disco lights. “Me and the girls always dreamed of doing a headline tour,” she tells me. “I feel like I’m always doing it for the group as well as myself. It’s such a dream come true.”

The plan for the next year or so, JADE tells me, is to do it all again—write a new album, travel everywhere, build the rooms a little larger and her world a little wider. It is head-cocking, at first, to hear an artist so fluent in the tribulations of the music industry speak so assuredly of her desire to remain inside of it. But her relationship to the machine looks a lot different now: if Powell and Pressburger’s red shoes beckoned motion unto annihilation, it seems JADE has a hold of their laces. She dances now with authorship over her choreography—the applause remains intoxicating, her fanbase rabid for her. Her and the shoes have a mutual understanding that as long as she’s in control, she won’t be stopping anytime soon. 

“I think, for me, the dream is to evolve—I’m going to surprise people again,” she says. “I want to tour bigger venues, travel to more places.” She looks to her hands, turning them outward, testing their span. “I want it to get bigger.”

Photographed by Kolby Knight

Styled by Gabriela Langone

Written by Melanie Perez

Hair: Charles McNair

Makeup: Mollie Gloss

DP: John Atencio

Retoucher: Olga Pavlova

Flaunt Film Editor: Shannon Meserve

Stylist Assistant: Reyner Reyes

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