Gazing around the University of Central Lancashire's student venue, you would be hard pressed to know that the coalition government had just effectively privatised tertiary education. Instead of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, there is just the mild crunch of plastic alcopop bottle underfoot as the crowd anticipate rather more pressing business. They are here to toast the success of rapper Tinie Tempah, and then – in the words of his all-conquering first hit – pass out.
This is a crowd for whom dancing while twittering comes naturally. "First one to tweet me gets a T-shirt!" declares Tempah's DJ Charlesy, charged with warming up the room with club-pop mash-ups. The T-shirts are good, too: Tinie's logo is a mug of tea with shades on, harking back to his tea-themed blog, Milk & 2 Sugars, which predated his pop success.
Suddenly, there is a screech as a grainy image of the dressing room sputters into life on the screen at the back of the stage. It's a live link to the backstage area, being filmed by the tiny camera on Tinie's iBook and broadcast on Ustream, the free online video-streaming service, with which Tinie maintains a novel and immediate level of access for fans. A tweet went out half an hour earlier, priming his never-disconnected fans for the broadcast.
Everyone squeals as dimly lit young men mill about in and out of shot; it is, absurdly, quite exciting. The one wearing a hoodie and big shades has a huge grin on his face. With good reason: 21-year-old Tinie has gone straight to No 1 in the albums chart with his debut, Disc-Overy. (It's a quaint title, perhaps, when you consider physical discs are probably as alien to his demographic as 78rpm vinyl.)
He gilded that lily with two singles in the top 5 – "Written in the Stars" and "Miami 2 Ibiza" (his collaboration with the self-explanatory Swedish House Mafia). With that hit rate, we should, by rights, be in some access-all-ages enormodrome on the edge of town. But Preston is just the third date of Tinie Tempah's first-ever headline tour of the UK, testament to the fact that his success has come very swiftly. Tinie only signed his major label contract this time last year, releasing "Pass Out" in March.
But success has come slowly too. Five years ago, grime was dismissed as a niche genre whose paranoid, spittle-flecked appeal made little sense outside the E postcodes of London. Now, even the industrial/agrarian expanses of the north-west have been co-opted. Starting with Dizzee Rascal's 2008 collaboration with Scottish dance-pop producer Calvin Harris, "Dance Wiv Me", grime evolved, sloughing off its symbiotic relationship to strife, and becoming a boundary-free party music.
With the link between hip-hop and the streets severed, the way was paved for an ambitious teenager from Plumstead, south-east London to become the UK's partial answer to Kanye West. Clutching a sparkly black mike, Tinie raps about girls, success, Veuve Clicquot and Dyson hoovers rather than inner-city pressure. Or as he puts it on the jubilant "Simply Unstoppable" tonight: "I've gone pop and I won't stop/Pringles!" As well as his DJ, there's a live band, whose (slightly too) frequent guitar licks are testament to Tinie's genre-straddling insouciance. Later, there will be a little video tribute from former Destiny's Child Kelly Rowland, whose disembodied voice graces his least interesting song, "Invincible".
Tonight, Tinie Tempah proves a genial entertainer; slick without being noisome, pop without being remedial. A misjudged version of Coldplay's "When I Ruled the World" momentarily stalls the set. Preston responds rather better to the tunes about hedonism. The club-oriented "Miami 2 Ibiza" makes perfect sense here; a stunning demolition of "Pass Out" in the encore comes augmented by some chirping from Charlesy's decks. "I been to Preston but I never been to Scunthorpe," Tinie rhymes. Throughout, he assures the Preston crowd that they have been a much crazier audience than Loughborough or Cardiff, but the cliche is delivered with warmth and humour. Bands have always taken photos of the crowd from the stage, but one of Tinie's band comes on with the laptop, capturing the crowd for Ustream.
Some genre puritans have dismissed Tempah as a lightweight; last week, I griped that Disc-Overy's lyrical revelations were disappointingly insubstantial. But it is worth remembering that before gangsta rap came to dominate American hip-hop, much of it had been feel-good party music, littered with pop culture reference rather than bullet casings. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Afrika Bambaataa and the Sugarhill Gang certainly all bore the imprint of disco, too.
It is, ultimately, narrow-minded and unimaginative to demand narratives of deprivation and vengeance from our young MCs, and dismiss anything else as inauthentic. Hang-ups about hip-hop are out of place here: this is a pop show, and a very good one at that.
