"A middle-aged melancholic stuck in the body of a teenager." That is how 17-year-old songbird Laura Marling explains her precocious talent, with typically downbeat humour.

She's been championed by Jamie T, collaborated with The Rakes, has a debut EP in the bag and now a record deal with Virgin Records. All this and Laura hasn't even left school yet - although she is "desperate to".

Laura's burgeoning success is deserved and inevitable. Her folky, melodic songs about love, hate and trickery are both poetic and unaffected, sung and strummed with an effortless, low-slung confidence.

Currently spending most of her time in London, Laura still has a soft spot for Reading, where she comes from. "You can get away with stuff. You can sit in a grotty pub, smoking at the weekend and not get hassled like you would in London."

It's not so rife with posers, either. In Reading you can be yourself more. It's more laidback." Admittedly, she's something of an anomaly in Reading, "where nothing much happens" - a firecracker in a barren sky. In London, she says, "you couldn't stick out if you tried. You're surrounded by people doing, if not the same, then something bigger."

With her messy blonde hair and a charity shop wardrobe though, she likes to be different. "I just hate the idea of all these girls you see coming out of Top Shop looking the same," she says.

It's unsurprising there were plenty of record company types vying to get their mitts on Laura. Her dad taught her to play the guitar in front of the family fire from the age of three and raised her on a diet of Bob Dylan and blues. One particularly smitten wannabe manager was so put out that she turned him down, he sneaked off and copyrighted lauramarling.com out of spite.

"We've sorted it out now, but what a d***head," she says.

Laura's songs are far from the angst-ridden diary entries you might expect from a Sixth Form poet. Her sweet turn of phrase is more streetwise than that.

"I spend a lot of time on it," she says. "The best songs come late at night in a dark room when I've got a hangover. Everything I write about is my own experience.

"I think some of my lyrics are quite unsubtle, though. I'm not really a storyteller. I would like to be. Maybe If I get better at writing..."

Clearly the girl has very high standards.

  • Starts 8pm, tickets £5. Call 01273 686668