With new album Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends sitting atop the charts after just three days and 300,000 sales, you would think Chris Martin might finally relax. But after a month which has seen Coldplay’s frontman walk out of two interviews in the face of the most gentle of interrogations, it’s best to assume nothing. He may have befriended high-rolling rap tycoons such as Jay-Z and Kanye West, but their sense of entitlement has yet to rub off on the man who, in this month’s Q, preemptively referred to his group as “the world’s biggest bland”.

Perhaps coming back to the live arena with a free show – tickets “won” on a raffle basis – was a further lowering of the stakes, easing Martin into a role with which his modest ego seems to struggle.

“I know there’s been complaints about the ticket price,” he joked prior to the cathartic squall of Chinese Sleep Chant. Usually when a band returns with product to flog, trusted hits are spaced out in order to rack up goodwill for the new, less familiar stuff. Coldplay ought to take pride in the fact that the evening’s most exciting moments came with songs that the assembled throng were only just getting to know.

Switching from piano to guitar for 42, Martin bobbed about in his customarily awkward legs-apart manner before guitarist Jonny Buckland lit the touch-paper on the song’s propulsive middle section.

Next to that and the instrumental opener, Life In Technicolour, 2003 hit Clocks sounded like a half-formed idea that – under the current regime – would be lucky to fill 30 seconds of a new number. Similarly, the seismic current single Violet Hill sounded like a song with enough going on to sustain its creators a year down the line when they have had to sing it in five continents.

That the same couldn’t be said of Coldplay’s last album X&Y perhaps accounted for its almost entire absence from the setlist. Only Fix You made its way into the set – a mawkish memento of a period when creative complacency seemed to render Coldplay irrelevant. [That said, some things remain unchanged. Martin couldn’t resist a deferential allusion to Radiohead – a band whose continued envelope-pushing serves merely to compound his own insecurities.] Three years on, Coldplay sounded like a band who may have finally found an acre of sonic terrain to call their own. The journey travelled to this point was elegantly marked by an acoustic version of their maiden hit Yellow. If the ovation that greeted it doesn’t silence the voices in Martin’s head, only a psychiatrist or, maybe, hearing specialist can help him now.

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