For a lady who insists that she is "very melancholy" and apologises to her audience that "I have only sad songs", Souad Massi makes a remarkably good job of acting as if she is having a really good time. After leaving her young baby with minders in the dressing room upstairs, she arrives on stage in jeans and a very French blue and white striped sweater, looking like a young mum having a great night out.

It's what she seems to do almost every night, but the constant touring has brought her an easy confidence and charm that comes in handy for a noisy, over-crowded rock venue like the new Marquee. She is in such a jovial mood that when a heckler demands to be allowed on stage to demonstrate his guitar skills, she invites him up to do just that. He's rubbish, of course, but it's a gesture that rightly delights the Marquee crowd.

The shy, quiet exile from Algeria, who initially won over her audiences with exquisitely gentle laments of lost love and longing for home, has been transformed. From her new home in Paris, she has developed into a celebrity, and the change is reflected in her music. Backed by a five-piece band, led by guitarist Jean-François Kellner, and now joined by a drums, percussion, bass, and an oud player who could switch to guitar and an Arabic-sounding banjo, she showed that sad songs can be performed with enthusiasm as well as passion.

Starting gently with Mesk Elil, her slushy new piece about missing Algeria, she quickly moved into a far more pained ballad of exile and hardship, Yemma, but then allowed her powerful band to add a more hard-edged, rousing backing. The mood constantly changed. There were drifting oud passages, a sing-along on Ghir Enta ("the only love song in my repertoire") and a final switch from the sad and gentle Malou to the Arabic-flamenco stomp of Ech Edani.

This was the wrong venue for Souad Massi, but she came through in style.