Pleasing a crowd consisting of tight-jeaned indie scenesters, lager-swilling rude boys and gold-chained wannabe gangstas is never going to be an easy task. When undertaken by a 21-year old skinny white boy from Wimbledon clutching an acoustic bass guitar, you begin to fear for the worst.

Yet therein lies the charm of young Jamie Treays. He is not particularly indie, or folk, or reggae, or hip hop, yet manages to blend all these styles and more into a single verse better than most artists can manage on an entire album.

Thin as a rake and with a sky-scraping unruly quiff, to the uninitiated at Islington Academy he may well have looked like a ragamuffin stage invader. With a smirk and a West London twanged "good evening" he raced through opening number Brand New Bass Guitar, accelerating faster and faster towards a full-blooded rock out. Beer was thrown and moshing ensued, and this barely one song in.

Switching between acoustic bass, electric guitar and simply rapping, Jamie's confidence grew noticeably with every tune. When deprived of an instrument, he at first looked pensive and awkward, but as the roar of approval grew louder he stalked the stage like a whippet-thin rapping idol, hands in the air, throwing shapes with reckless abandon.

Dispensing briefly with his backing band, The Pacemakers, Jamie went back to his early days to perform a solo Back In The Game. "It's been a while," he muttered afterwards, but you certainly wouldn't have known it and the biggest cheer of the night so far confirmed the crowd's approval and bodes well for his impending jaunt around the country.

Since those early acoustic shows, performing to sparse crowds in small pubs, Mr T's star has risen considerably. Recent singles Calm Down Dearest and If You Got The Money incited even more frenzied devotion from the swarm of dancing disciples, and in turn Jamie and his band clearly fed off this.

Towards the end of the set, he ventured to touch hands with the front row like a guttersnipe Bono at his own private Live Aid, eventually grabbing one to dance around onstage throughout Salvador.

Lyrically, there have been inevitable comparisons to the likes of Mike Skinner and Arctic Monkeys. Yet couplets such as "Bang, bang Anglo Saxons at the disco, ah tishoo, we all fall down" display a level of wordplay far beyond his contemporaries. His mix of cliché and slang is in fact far more reminiscent of Ray Davies or Joe Strummer.

With a sound that is completely his own and debut LP, Panic Prevention, pending, 2007 could well be Jamie T's year. In an industry fast drowning under the weight of rip-offs and re-hashes, he should be applauded.