Listening in to people’s post-gig chats is an illuminating thing. More often than not, they’re fairly anodyne streams of superlatives – “mate, wasn’t *insert artist here* sooooo good? Like, a-maaaaaazing?” The nattering I overheard from gig-goers leaving the Junction on Thursday night, however, offered a particularly distinctive type of praise: “irresistible”, “gorgeous”. Lianne La Havas’s turn had clearly left the Cambridge crowd, including this reviewer, utterly seduced.

I can’t say I was surprised. The woman, for a start, is a stunner. All messy ringlets and smouldering stare, La Havas has incredible stage presence. Despite this gift, it was not the most polished of shows. The first date in her rescheduled UK tour following illness last year, it took while for her band to warm up and find their feet.

But La Havas was helped by an enviable skill: being literally pitch-perfect. The brooding ‘No Room for Doubt’, a duet with Willy Mason which she performs both parts of tonight, was not an obvious first number to rally the troops. But the velvet-vocalled songstress performs with such ease that this gentle acoustic number achieves an unexpected energy, and from this point on, the audience hung on to her every note.

The phrase “even better live” is a cliché, but so accurate in this instance. Her material on record can veer too much into sweetness and light. Live, her vocals are gutsy. The chorus of ‘Lost and Found’ – “You broke me and taught me/to truly hate myself” – by a singer like Corinne Bailey Rae might have sounded like a plaintive lament. Sung by La Havas, each word seemed as if it had been wrenched from her.

The offshoot is that sometimes this ends up taken too far. The emotional trajectory of latest single ‘Gone’ speaks for itself; a spurned woman’s self-rebuke for letting her lover treat her like dirt, and who now wants out. La Havas is most impressive, then, when she keeps it simple during the song’s blues-inspired moments, than when indulging her inner Mariah by tonsil-twisting across octaves simply because her vocal range means she can.

She ends the show with crowd-pleaser acoustic ‘Age’. When performed last year on Later with Jools Holland, it won her the immediate invite of a supporting gig for Bon Iver from frontman Justin Vernon, and after this sassy performance, it isn’t hard to see why. It is her very lack of polish and an obvious relish for performing that makes her such an endearing presence.

With performances already on the cards for the summer’s festival circuit, this lady looks set to own 2013. If tonight’s performance was anything to go by, she’ll be breaking hearts with those vocals even longer.