How special did it feel to be playing a West London venue on this humid Monday night? As it happens, Lily Allen could barely count the ways. The 21-year-old’s debut album Alright, Still had been in the shops for a matter of hours. Dressed in a shiny green tulip dress, she also took no little pleasure in announcing that the current single Smile was still at No 1. Then, pointing in a westerly direction, Allen told us that she had grown up just “two streets away”.

It wouldn’t have taken a genius to guess that Allen is a product of these streets. Take a walk along Portobello Road on any given morning and the hubbub of market-stall radios and music blaring out from specialist shops might strike you as a less poppy approximation of what she does.

In pop terms, the summer already belongs to Smile, but tonight it became apparent that live performance represents a whole new set of challenges for Allen. It didn’t help that for the boisterous bubblegum reggae of LDN, her voice struggled to be heard over the band — odd from a singer who sounds so confident on record.

If a much-improved second half — featuring a rapturously received Smile and a sinuous funk reading of Kaiser Chiefs’ Oh My God — was anything to go by, Dutch courage probably did no harm either. Sipping lager from a plastic cup before commencing Littlest Things, she revealed that, of her small canon, this break-up tune was “the closest to my heart”.

It showed, too. Sounding like a far less annoying Dido after a heavy session of red wine and chanson, she channelled reserves of vulnerability which, at a stroke, could send an army of Nuts readers competing to defend her honour.

For the scores of teenagers braving the heat to stand at the hem of her shiny dress, her mere existence at this time is enough to elicit allegiance. The charts could use a funny, female practitioner of savvy, streetwise pop vignettes. If Lily Allen can believe in her own voice as much as everyone else does, her star can’t fail to keep rising.

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