Rita Ora

If there is a sense when Rita Ora walks into a room that a star has already been ordained from above then nobody appears to have told the young Londoner and future pop princess herself. She has not an air or a grace about her. She greets the bar staff dotted in the hostelries of her neighborhood like old friends, mostly because they are. She bumps knuckles with the coat check chicks and management with the same egalitarian smile. Friends stop by for a brief ‘Hi’. Strangers look on with a discernible, barely contained ‘wow’. There is no mistaking the fact that Saturday night in Notting Hill is brightened by a touch of Rita’s special aura. She might not have been born this way, but she was recognizably named it.

Buzz acts come and go, but the pertinent feeling amongst those that have heard the results of her knockout first round in the recording studio as a bona fide solo star, accompanied by a blue chip roster of production hands, is that the effect Rita Ora has locally is about to translate to the upper terrains of the global pop market. A composite of street-smarts of the metropolitan life she was schooled in and pure, urgent, otherworldly star quality, she makes for a brilliantly contradictory mix.

Rita is one of the few British female singers that has emerged singing the opening bars of her career ready for world star status. So why is she so palpably shy of celebrating herself? "Because, you know what? I might seem confident about all this. It might be all I’ve ever wanted. It might even be all I’m ever any good at. But I am still really, really nervous about it all."