We’ve been cheerleading hard for Jade ever since her Little Mix days – so we’re over the moon to see her solo music is finally starting to get the international recognition it deserves.
Two years ago, the South Shields-born singer unveiled her first ever solo offering, Angel Of My Dreams – which went on to make the top 10 here in the UK and earned Jade her first ever solo Brit Award.
Last month, it also gained further recognition when it was featured in the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, leading to a surge in streams around the globe.
Upon its debut in July 2024, the experimental track quickly grabbed fans’ attention thanks to its unique structure and lyrical content – not to mention the fact it changes tempo three times in as many minutes.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, it also incorporated a distorted sample of Sandie Shaw’s Eurovision-winning signature tune Puppet On A String.
This was actually an idea Jade came up with years earlier.
“I’ve been trying to sample Puppet On A String for years,” she said in a voicenote uploaded to Spotify shortly before Angel Of My Dreams’ release.
“I had a session […] years ago…and [the producer] did a session and was like ‘do you remember when you used to try and sample Puppet On A String all the time?’. I was like, ‘that’s so random that you remember that about me, I mustn’t have let it go’. I was like ‘oh, well maybe we should do it’.”
Elaborating more about why she wanted to interpolate Puppet On A String into Angel Of My Dreams, Jade said (via Genius), Jade said: “In the beginning of our career [people] do think you are this puppet, but at the same time it isn’t true – [Little Mix] wrote a lot of our songs, and we were behind a lot of what we put out there, [so] I resented that as a statement.”
“It felt natural to take that and show that it can be true and untrue at the same time,” she added.
Last year, Jade revealed she’d received a sweet message from Sandie Shaw about her song, calling Angel Of My Dreams “an amazing piece of work” that she was “thrilled to be” a part of.
Sandie enthused: “A rage of love and hate about the music industry. Right up my street.
“I have been fighting all my working life to make the music industry a better place and so happy that you have used your creativity to do this in such a glorious epic way.”
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Jade has previously spoken at length about how Angel Of My Dreams was her way of addressing her feelings on the music industry at large, after 10 years as a member of the chart-topping girl group Little Mix.
This includes a not-so-subtle lyrical pop at her former label boss Simon Cowell, when Jade sings that she “sold my soul to a psycho”, an apparent nod to the former X Factor judge’s Syco brand.
“It’s not specifically about that,” she said when asked about these reports by Beat magazine. “But I wanted the song to be my journey, from entering the music business to now, and what that’s felt like. That’s why the song feels so chaotic.
“The opening is like the music to that montage bit on The X Factor after you’ve won and you’re just catapulted into the industry.”
She added: “I don’t want to sit here and bash the last 13 years of my life. I’m very happy and content. But like with any job, there are highs and lows. That’s just life, and it’s my reality, but it’s about writing it in a way that’s not woe is me.”
That’s Showbiz, Baby!, the album that followed Angel Of My Dreams, earned rave reviews upon its release in 2025, including a nod at the Brit Awards and a nomination for the coveted Mercury Music Prize.
Jade is now hard at work on a follow-up, describing her new material as “insane”.
