Thursday 07/09/06 Inara George @ The Borderline, London

London really doesn't know how lucky it is. Faced with the chance to see genuine rock royalty in an absurdly intimate venue, only a few hardy souls braved the horrors of the Charing Cross Road to make it to a half-full Borderline last Wednesday. If any of the late-night drinkers had strayed off the tried and tested crawl, they might have been lucky enough to stumble across Inara George, Californian singer-songwriter, daughter of late Little Feat singer Lowell George and god-daughter of Jackson Browne, hard at work in the basement bar, carving her own beautifully folky niche in Laurel Canyon folklore.

Coming to prominence only in the past few months, since her debut solo album, ‘All Rise’ was released on an unsuspecting public after spells in short-lived group Merrick, George is a folk singer in the most classic sense of the word. Put though her paces by Donnie Darko composer Michael Andrews, the album is a masterpiece in swooning, beguiling folk, at times jazzy, at times rocky. Taking to the stage with an electric guitar, a drummer, a bassist and a perma-grin, Inara's impressive canon of songs are at once tender and sharp, mesmeric and dark – calling to mind contemporaries like Beth Orton and at times, during a more experimental number, even Bjork or Radiohead.

The jazzy, nightingale-perfect 'Fools Work' and the razor-sharp 'Mistress', with the lyric "Will you take me as a mistress?" are lingering mediations on love and longing, while single 'Genius' is a sparky power pop number, the sassy "Everyone wants to be a genius, you're not the only one" a perfect example of Inara's knack of turning something quirky into something much, much more pointed. Likewise, muted opener 'No Poem's' "If I was you, I wouldn't talk, I'd just keep dancing" is as cute as the performer herself.

Despite not being 'pretty' in a conventional sense, Inara exudes a sexiness and sassiness that the Rachel Stevens of this world would chop a neatly manicured arm off for – one mention of the word "vagina" early in the set is enough to reduce many  male knees in the venue to jelly. Her onstage persona, veering quickly from quirky, flirty joke-telling (think Phoebe from Friends with A-Levels) to dreamy chanteuse is a joy to behold, and the concert slips away in no time at all. It's her remarkable unpretentiousness, and unselfconsciousness that allows her to crack dirty jokes with the token rubbish heckler, and also attempt some prototype dance moves during 'Bomb'.

And just when the audience feels they've figured her out, she about-turns, playing a gloriously heart-wrenching solo version of Joe Jackson's 'Fools in Love" as her encore. Inara George certainly looks and sounds the part. Belying her ancestry, Inara's work owes as much of a debt to folksmiths like Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro as it does to her father's work, and we can only hope that she'll be able to replicate her forbearer's commercial successes.