A Night Out With Jade Thirlwall

“I’ll probably get on stage and shake my little titties,” says Jade Thirlwall, her thick brown curls practically filling the cozy corner booth of this Bushwick cocktail bar. It’s just before midnight at The Narrows, and the British pop star is going over our agenda for the next few hours: an appearance at 3 Dollar Bill, where drag queens will be performing her songs to a crowd of Brooklyn’s hippest and sweatiest queers. The club had hosted a tribute party in her honor a few months ago, after the Little Mix star released her solo debut, “Angel of My Dreams,” and she wanted to show her appreciation with a sequel — this time with her attendance.

“Any sort of American promo, I’m like, ‘Thank you! Thank you! You’re doing the Lord’s work!’” says Thirlwall, who releases music under just her first name. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a gay bar in New York. I’ve been to gay bars all over America, but for some reason not in New York. I will be getting drunk. I will be having a good time.”

Even if you aren’t familiar with her work in Little Mix, you only have to look up “Angel of My Dreams” to understand that you’re dealing with international gay-club royalty. Channeling the twisted theatricality of early Lady Gaga and the manic meta-commentary of newly solo Gwen Stefani, “Angel” is a tempo-shifting, wig-flying, zero-f*cks account of Thirlwall’s love-hate relationship with the music industry, with a darkly comic music video that does in four minutes what The Idol basically tried to do in its whole first season.

“I live and breathe pop music. I know my history. I know my pop girlies. I spend my weekends just watching music videos,” Thirlwall says. “All the big pop girlies I’ve grown up listening to, I’m like, ‘OK, what did I love about them? What gave me butterflies when I’d get a new record from them?’”

After spending the first decade of her career in a girl group, she knew she had only one chance to reintroduce herself. “I remember playing it to my mum, and she was like, ‘Ugh, it’s relentless!’ and I was like, ‘Perfect!’” Thirlwall recalls, laughing. “I’d much rather get that response than ‘This is a nice song.’ In my head I was like, ‘I’m going to throw the f*cking kitchen sink in and give it my all. And if you like it or not, you can respect the risk.’”

Fans went predictably crazy for it, but the reaction that surprised Thirlwall the most was from other artists. Taylor Swift added it to her pre-show playlist on The Eras Tour. Camila Cabello called her a shining example of “artistic integrity” in a radio interview. Thirlwall says her DMs and comments were filling up with messages of support from pals and strangers alike, including Stormzy, Raye, Florence Welch, and Brooke Candy. “It’s the biggest response I’ve ever had,” she says.

Beyond her bold aesthetic choices, her lyrics captured the precarity of trying to hold your place on the pop leaderboard — and said aloud what many artists were no doubt thinking but perhaps afraid to voice. As Thirlwall sings to an imaginary record executive on the song: “If I don’t win, I’m in the bin / You say you never knew me / But when I pop off, you sue me, so sue me!”

As our drinks arrive — Thirlwall is tickled to discover the existence of Phony Negronis — she tells me that, in many ways, Little Mix beat the odds. After forming on the X Factor in 2011, the members overcame an uphill battle for credibility, took a front seat with songwriting and creative direction, endured plenty of tabloid scrutiny, and even survived the messy departure of original member Jesy Nelson in 2020. “The fact that we lasted for over 10 years — you don’t hear many girl bands that have lasted that long,” Thirlwall says.

Yet even at the peak of their success, she always felt they were one underperforming single away from being “in the danger zone.” “Coming out of the X Factor, you are on this conveyor belt. You see other people from the show, the minute they’re not in the top 10, they’re going to get dropped, and you’re just like, ‘Hope it’s not me!’”

She wrote “Angel of My Dreams” during another tense moment in her career, when the head of her label left the company mere months after signing her as a solo artist. An unsexy secret of the music industry, Thirlwall explains, is how much an artist’s career can live and die by whether their champion at the label sticks around.

“I was sh*tting myself,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, what if someone else comes in and they don’t get it?’ If you get someone who doesn’t really believe in what you’re doing, or it’s not their baby because they didn’t start [your project] with you, then that could be really detrimental. At that point, you’re stuck in a contract.”

She thinks more pop songs should be about work, actually. “I’m in a healthy, happy relationship — there’s nothing dramatic to write about there!” she says of her boyfriend, musician and actor Jordan Stephens, whom she’s been with since 2020. Job drama, on the other hand, is widely relatable.

“Especially in the creative industry, you have to be obsessed with your work. If you’re not obsessed with it, you just get swallowed up and spat back out. You have to live and breathe doing the job. Being a pop girlie is my life. I love it. I’m in love with the industry, all the good bits and the bad bits. So when I was thinking about what my first song would be — that’s always been the love of my life.”

It’s officially the wee hours now, and Thirlwall is hobbling around the empty streets outside the bar as she takes some photos. “That’s the one thing I haven’t learned from drag queens: how to walk in heels,” she jokes as members of her team trail behind. Soon we all pile into her car, where Thirlwall touches up her makeup and runs through the details of our next stop with one of her managers. The plan: As the drag artist Jupiter Genesis finishes a performance of “Angel of My Dreams,” Thirlwall will emerge during the final chorus, say a few remarks, and bop around to a new song, “It Girl,” which promptly plays over the car speakers.

“They’re not expecting full kat-kitty-kat-kat-kat choreo?” Thirlwall asks the car, doing half-hearted vogue hands. She confirms she can wing it. “It’s OK if it’s a little mess,” she says.

“It Girl” isn’t out yet, but fans already know it (by its previously reported title “That’s Showbiz Baby”). Thirlwall snuck a snippet of the track’s booming hook online as a little Easter egg not long after “Angel” came out as a way to focus-group material. “I feel like I’ve been hounded so much by the fans that I have no choice but to release it now,” she says.

The freedom to put out songs when and how she wants is one of the perks of solo stardom. “I’ve spent years and years being conditioned: ‘This is what a rollout should be, this is how it should run, this is the blueprint of the super safe option,’” she says, acknowledging Little Mix’s clockwork pace. (All six of the group’s studio albums arrived in November, one to two years apart.) This time, she wants to have some fun, too. “I like the idea of nobody knowing what’s coming next or when it’s going to come. I might just drop a song, or I’ll do a buildup to a big song. I like the chaos of this campaign.”

Which brings us to the butt plugs.

To promote her new single “Fantasy,” a Diana-Ross-on-poppers anthem of sexual liberation, Thirlwall hit up her friend Samuel Douek — a music video director and founder of the nightlife and sexual wellness brand Howl — to create merch offerings that included sex toys, lube, and hanky-code bandanas. “Listen, what’s a butt plug between friends?” Thirlwall says drolly. “I’ve seen people complain about it. I’m like, ‘God, you’ve clearly never used one’ — get into it! Try it! Get the ‘Fantasy’ bundle, my lovely, you’ll be surprised.”

It’s just another way she’s having a wink at the business of being a pop star. “One, I know who my fanbase are, and two, this is nothing I’m not into myself,” she says, laughing. “I actually wanted to push it further. I’m like, ‘Anal beads! Pegging!’ [My team] was like, ‘I think we’ll be OK with butt plugs and lubes.’ We talked about condoms, but when one of them splits, you’re in trouble, so it’s actually safer to do a butt plug.”

We pull up to the venue. The event’s organizers greet her outside and usher her through the club, behind the DJ booth, and into a small green room where go-go boys, drag queens, and club personnel file in and out all night. Thirlwall sings along when a DJ plays Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” and mouths “I love this song!” when a remix of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” comes on. When Thirlwall grabs a seat, I tell her she resembles RuPaul’s Drag Race star Kandy Muse’s famous “sitting alone in the VIP” meme, and she immediately folds her hands in her lap and stares straight ahead to recreate the pose exactly. (Later on, I spy an off-duty Kandy Muse in the crowd.)

The night doesn’t look that different from Thirlwall’s going-out routine at home in London. “I genuinely can’t remember the last time I went to a straight bar,” she says. “They don’t exist to me. Maybe when I was single, like five years ago?” Unlike in America, U.K. bartenders more diligently measure out shots when mixing cocktails. “It’s very sophisticated. I always take it too far over here because they just free-pour everything,” she adds. “I have been spiked in the U.S. twice. Both times in a gay bar — in L.A. and in Miami. My friends and I kind of made light of it: ‘I saved a twink that night!’ That’s allyship. But I’ve had so many good nights out in the U.S.”

Thirlwall is just in time to catch a sparkly performance of her song “Midnight Cowboy” from Lana Ja’Rae — who a few days later would cause a small controversy in the drag world by wearing fishtank platform heels with live goldfish inside — and she perches side-stage as Beaujangless struts around for a hair-flipping rendition of “Fantasy.” Thirlwall’s been going to drag shows her whole life. On family vacations as a kid, she’d watch in awe as old-school British queens would impersonate the likes of Shirley Bassey and Diana Ross. “I always saw drag and divaship hand in hand,” she says. As an adult, she’s made multiple appearances on Drag Race’s U.K. editions and even recruited some of the franchise’s famous alumni to back her up in Little Mix music videos.

“My worst nightmare is seeming performative or opportunistic,” she says. She’s inspired by the way even shy, introverted performers can unlock a powerful persona once on stage. And the way she sees it, she’s just showing up for the community that’s always shown up for her. “Some of the queens have literally helped me become who I am now. Willam really took me under her wing. She styled me on shoots before when I didn’t have a budget. She was like, ‘Girl, come to my studio, here’s some looks, here’s some wigs.’ They’ve really rallied around me when I needed it.”

At one point during the fun, New York nightlife fixture Amanda Lepore, who up close looks like a fragile pop-art sculpture come to life, stops in to say hello. “We met very briefly before, but it was lovely to have more of a catch-up — mostly about our mutual love for David!” Thirlwall tells me later. That would be legendary photographer David LaChapelle, a longtime collaborator of Lepore’s who just directed Thirlwall’s “Fantasy” video. “We wanted [Lepore] in the ‘Fantasy’ video, but it didn’t work out,” she says. “She is iconic and so sweet. I’m hoping the three of us can get together the next time we’re all in L.A.”

The “Fantasy” video builds on the grotesque imagery of “Angel of My Dreams” by putting Thirlwall at the center of a bloody Carrie homage. “I don’t think I realized I was doing that with all my visuals until someone brought it up to me: ‘F*cking hell, are you obsessed with gore and horror?’ And I was like ‘Oh! I am!’” she says.

A lifelong Rocky Horror fan who’s currently “obsessed” with The Substance, Thirlwall thinks pop music is at its best when it traffics in WTF energy. “Whether it was Madonna with ‘Like a Prayer’ or Gaga when she came out or Britney with ‘Everytime’ — we felt uncomfortable watching that video because we were let into her life and we played a part in her feeling like that,” she says. “All those pop moments have that thread of ‘Oh God, I don’t know how I feel about this.’”

Finally, it’s go time. Clutching a small motorized fan to keep things from getting too sweaty, she walks onstage to finish off an “Angel” lip-sync with Jupiter Genesis as a sea of hands and phones go up in the cheering crowd. There’s a small mix-up with the music — the DJ puts on an Alex Chapman remix of “Fantasy” instead of the new track, but Thirlwall carries on with a goofy whatever shrug. She lingers on stage, dancing and posing as the night’s performers join her, until “It Girl” finally plays.

She’ll slip out just before 2 a.m., but not before grabbing a mic and addressing the crowd: “I want to thank the queens. And I want to thank you guys because I want to say that without the LGBTQ community, I wouldn’t be a Main Pop Girlie.” The audience roars. “I will stand with you always! I will shake my little titties for you always!”