Earlier this year, Rita Ora – a 21-year-old Londoner born in Kosovo – told the Guardian her mentor Jay-Z believed she could be as big as his previous protege, Rihanna. Maybe he's right: with the year not even out, she has now had No 1 hits (including her vocal on DJ Fresh's drum'n'bass smash Hot Right Now) and toured with Coldplay.

Her first headline show in a small venue could be expected to be the acid test, but things are going swimmingly. "Ree-ta!" scream the teenage girls in the audience. "This is a song I did with will.i.am," Ora squeals, all blonde tresses and big grin, as the hands-in-the-air banger Fall in Love prompts more cheering.

She can hardly fail. She was trained at the Sylvia Young stage school, she's had advice from Beyoncé, and her co-writers include Drake and Stargate. "I wanted to make an album for everybody," she explains, music to her record company's ears, as she sings from a debut album that incorporates a mass of pop styles. She reveals songs are being roadtested to gauge audience reaction to potential future singles (cheering for Radioactive, chatter through Hello, Hi, Goodbye).

At times, the gig feels like a marketing exercise, but it's impossible to dislike a singer whose big voice invests warmth in material from instant stomper Uneasy to Frank Ocean's Swim Good, and whose boundless enthusiasm and girl-next-door persona make her seem like a winning fusion of Rihanna and Melinda Messenger. "Naughty, naughty!" she chuckles, admonishing a plastic bottle chucker, and is still grinning through the mass singalong R.I.P., the May No 1 that seems to wish much naughtier things upon a love rival.

"Who wants to party and bullshit with me?" she asks, in the words of How We Do (Party), and Manchester affirms.