Rita Ora: Badass, Beautiful, Brave

Pitch-perfect vocals, sassy signature style and the hottest job in TV: all-round badass Rita Ora is storming ahead, professionally. But what of life outside the limelight? Here, she talks the women who inspire her, meeting Prince, and the dangers of mixing business with pleasure...

- Karl Taro Greenfeld

Rita Ora has a plan. The fashion (Roberto Cavalli) and beauty (Rimmel London) endorsements, clothing line with Adidas Originals, campaign with Coca-Cola, performing a song (Grateful) at the Oscars, and appearing as a judge on this year’s X Factor, are all testimony that the plan is working. ‘Oh, it is in full effect. We’re these conniving Kosovan hungry bitches,’ Ora (born Sahatçiu) says of herself and her older sister, Elena Sahatçiu, who is also her manager. ‘I knew I was going to do things my way.’

The London-based 24-year-old insists the plan is a secret, but that it has been nearly ten years in the making. There was admission to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone by improvising an ‘uncomfortably sexual’ dance to Britney Spears’ I’m A Slave 4 U as an 11-year-old (before realising she hated musical theatre while attending school for musical theatre). There was singing torch songs by Janis Joplin, Carole King and Destiny’s Child in her father’s pub, the Queens Arms, when she was 14. There was recording her first song at the local youth centre on a council estate in Landbroke Grove. There was sneaking out to warehouse raves in east London, playing the house diva behind the turntables while her parents thought she was at a sleepover. ‘I would rip my T-shirts and be really punk and not clean. And I would have blonde hair, really dark eyebrows, red lipstick and lots of fake rings that made my fingers go green. I wouldn’t be smelling that great,’ Ora says. ‘I feel like I lived a lot when I shouldn’t have.’ She found her voice in those clubs and at her dad’s pub, the soulful alto, the easy glissando that makes Auto-Tuning superfluous.