If anything, quick failure would have made more sense. Ora, with a run of early hits heavily indebted to the sounds of the time, looked set to follow them into commercial oblivion. When RIP, her debut single, first impacted charts in May 2012, Jessie J was arguably the UK’s biggest female pop star, Emeli Sandé was in the midst of her suffocatingly inescapable imperial phase and Tulisa’s first solo single had just hit number one. Ora’s survival is all the more impressive when you consider the names dominating British pop at the time of her arrival on the scene.
In the six years between the release of her debut album and its follow-up in 2018, Ora bulldozed her way into film, television, fashion and the general celebrity ecosystem, refusing to buckle beneath a staggering level of setbacks that have historically sent the Pixie Lotts of the world into the pop ether. Ora is the sole female survivor of an era of quickly evaporated UK pop stars, a victory only enabled by her sheer will to succeed. But it’s only happened as a result of the most relentless media onslaught in recent memory. Immortalised by US talk show personality Wendy Williams asking, with every degree of seriousness in 2015, “Who is this woman?”, and chronicled in every episode of the C-list celebrity podcast Who? Weekly, Ora’s reputation for having no reputation has long been her trademark – even if today we all, deep down, know who Rita Ora is. One of the funniest running jokes in modern pop culture is that nobody actually knows who Rita Ora is. She’s said she’s been left “mortified” by her actions, but wouldn't it have been unusual if Ora hadn’t created a lockdown scandal at some point in 2020? After all, this is a pop star whose career is almost incidental to the embarrassments, mistakes and noise surrounding it. Yesterday, Ora was forced to apologise again: it turns out the bash occurred just a week after returning from Egypt, where she had played a private gig at the W Hotel for a six-figure sum. Last week, the British singer was forced to apologise for breaching government-issued rules by hosting a 30-strong party for her 30th birthday at London restaurant Casa Cruz. That stranger reclining on your friend’s sofa at the party that shouldn’t have happened? Yep, most likely it was Rita.
Booked an appointment with a backstreet hairdresser? Rita Ora was probably there as well. If you naughtily broke lockdown rules last month, chances are that Rita Ora was with you, too. This is an updated version of an article first published in 2018
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