So she knows what life is like on the other side of
the tracks. Her non-stop work ethic (which at one point meant she collapsed and had to be flown by helicopter to hospital) is the product of someone
who has had to battle from the word go. At first the family found the refugee tag was hard to shift. “ That word carries a lot of prejudice,” she says. “But it also made us determined to survive. When you put anyone into an alien environment, where other people aren’t completely comfortable with them being there, they are automatically going to be defensive. It’s the rule of the jungle, right?”

Growing up, she loved to listen to her parents’ record collection - Blondie, Hendrix and Earth Wind and Fire... and even (wait for it....) Celine Dion. She wanted to sing and act and, perhaps remarkably, her parents encouraged her. Her father worked double shifts and her mother waitressed tables to scrimp and save enough for her to go to the Sylvia Young theatre School. “I was the only student at school who wasn’t from a rich family: all these kids were Louis Vuitton’d out,” she says. “I was there with the same backpack for six years. But I didn’t care.”

By the time she was a teenager, the family’s hard work had paid off. Her dad owned a pub in Kilburn and Rita was singing there regularly. At 16, she managed to convince legendary manager Sarah Stennett,

who’d discovered the Sugababes, to meet her for a coffee. “I was desperate to get some studio time,” Rita remembers. She certainly made an impression. “She looked at me and said: ‘I’m going to help you. We’re going to put you in the studio today,’” Rita smiles. Within two years Stennett had helped her land a five- album deal with Jay-Z’s record label Roc Nation. Not bad for a 17-year-old raised in a council flat.

Before she knew it, Rita found herself on a plane to New York, from where she was taken to a Manhattan nightclub to meet Jay-Z himself. “He said hello and shook my hand. I couldn’t speak for a few minutes, which is unusual,” she laughs. “’You have a rm handshake!’” said Jay-Z. “’I like that.’”

She clearly made an impression on the rap mogul too. “You can see the potential,” Jay-Z said. “When she enters a room it changes... and that presence — you can’t duplicate it, especially at a young age. It was just infectious. She’s driven in that way.”

The honeymoon didn’t last though. Her first album did phenomenally well, but she fell out with Roc Nation and sued them arguing that they’d failed to release a number of albums that she’d written. “It felt like the worst thing,” she says. “But it was the only decision I could make. My appreciation and respect for them hasn’t changed at all. It was an easy separation. It could have been bad, but it was very respectful. It was one of the easiest separations ever.”

It feels like she might be glossing over things a little. The legal action took years to finalise and in the meantime there was no second album. For many artists a six year hiatus between first and second albums would have been disastrous. “ The best thing Jay-Z ever taught me was patience,” she smiles enigmatically. “He’s like the best older brother a girl could ever have.”