First Night: Ms Dynamite, Concorde II, Brighton

Explosive Ms Dynamite keeps her powder dry till the end

In the past year, Ms Dynamite aka Niomi McLean-Daley must have thought all her Christmases had arrived at once. As well as a pair of top ten singles, the 21-year-old singer bagged a heap of Mobo awards and, in September, beat David Bowie to win the prestigious Mercury Music Prize.

While it's doubtful that Dame David played a formative part in this former MC's musical education, the significance can't have been lost on her.

So it's with a palpable sense of anticipation that she takes the stage for the first time in her short career. As tough and explosive as her name suggests, Ms Dynamite is the hot new voice of the British hip-hop and R&B scene.

Along with recent albums by The Streets and Roots Manuva, her debut LP A Little Deeper, showed that, contrary to popular belief, British hip-hop is alive and well.

Appearing on stage dressed in a white vest and spangly jeans and smiling broadly, she opened with the might garage anthem "Booo!", her first one-off solo single. Like our host, it's upbeat and cheerful; not for her the moody ostentatiousness of her US counterparts Missy Elliot and L'il Kim.

Throughout the show she is chatty and warm, and repeatedly asks us if we're having a good time. We are.

The tempo is kept high and the temperature fiery for the first few numbers – "Sick'n'Tired", an elegy to put-upon girlfriends, is fabulous while the accordion-sampling "It Takes More", with it's gangsta-whipping lyric "If it's not too complex/Tell me how many Africans died for the buguettes on your Rolex" sends ripples of delight throughout the crowd.

For a while, everything goes swimmingly but halfway through the atmosphere begins to sag. Ms Dynamite's fondness for silky smooth R&B leads to a succession of ballads. Even with its slightly hysterical orchestration "Afraid 2 Fly" is tolerable but "Gotta Let U Know" is pure mush. Similar waves of nausea arrive during "All I Ever", a song so squeaky-clean and slushy you half expect Ronan Keating to appear for a duet.

Perhaps clocking the change in atmosphere Ms Dynamite eventually cranks up the tempo up again. "Put Him Out" restores the equilibrium and brings the singer's straight-talking streetwise persona back to the fore. During the encore we are treated to the song we've really been waiting for, the ragged and raucous "Dy-Na-Mi-Tee". It's a witty, eloquent and downright infectious track that how that, as well as being a cut above her contemporaries, Ms Dynamite remains one of the most exciting figures in British hip-hop.