Pete Yorn is the toast of the LA showbiz elite - his brother is a swanky Hollywood agent; the likes of Cameron Diaz and Matt Dillon turn out to hear him play - but nothing will shake the New Jersey roots out of the boy. To make sure we all got the point, he opened his set with a fragment of Bruce Springsteen's Atlantic City, and for an encore strummed his way through a sample of Dancing in the Dark. This, surely, had nothing to do with the fact that Springsteen's manager Jon Landau was at the back of the room.

There's an air of predestination about Yorn's progress. He wrote the music for the Jim Carrey flick Me, Myself and Irene even before he landed a deal with Columbia Records. And his debut album Musicforthemorningafter is getting him tipped as 2002's singer-songwriter du jour for its combination of guitar-band energy, wistful melodies and bruised and sullen lyrics. It probably doesn't hurt that his wavy black hair and artistic stubble suggest more than a hint of Tom Cruise.

This one-off performance, his UK debut, was intended to whet appetites for a larger-scale visit in a couple of months' time, to coincide with the album release. Yorn makes a slightly furtive frontman, muttering asides into the microphone and singing to himself rather than to the crowd. His voice needed to be shoved up much louder in the mix, too.

But you still got an inkling of what all the fuss is going to be about. His best songs, like the deceptively caustic Just Another or the tingling popabilly of Life on a Chain, suggest that Yorn is beginning to create his own self-contained universe, while Black and the cranked-up Closet were greeted with howls of delight by the mysteriously large US contingent in the house. For the UK brigade, there was even a speedy blast of the Smiths' Panic. It's a little early to start calling him "Boss", but cynics should not start spelling it "Yawn" either.