Gig played on 15/12/05

Clearly, they're in exulted company right now. Three nights at London's most elegant warehouse sell-out in the time it takes to faint, while crying "tickets are how much!?!" On support we have the iconic, inimitable and sadly no longer mad Richard Ashcroft, who has long since abandoned his visionary feels and levitations for corpse rock via man rock. As the U2 "McVertigo" tour and Rolling Stones travelling OAP home criss-cross the Earth, Coldplay are the fresh band and brand, corporate rock messengers with a big heart and an even bigger boardroom.

Fittingly, seconds after "Tomorrow Never Knows" - perhaps the most futuristic Beatles track of them all - has faded from the PA, the latest Fab Four emerge for another inevitable coronation. During the recording of "X&Y", the album that sealed Coldplay's global superstardom, talk was of revolution. Fifteen years or so back, U2 did the same, cancelling audiences with Dylan, torching Sun Studios and their cowboy hats for something far more cryptic. "Achtung Baby" and the accompanying "Zoo TV" tour was as black and provocative as you're gonna get in the world of stadium rock.

Coldplay, meanwhile, still have very little to say for themselves. Tonight, there's no war in Nicaragua, more a dispute over a garden fence. We're not ascending to heaven, rather going to church on a Sunday. Instead of an Irish poet's snapping faith and political hectoring, we've a geography teacher who badly, desperately, needs a haircut. "Nothing win and nothing left to lose" cries Sir Bono. "I could write a song a hundred miles long" suggests Chris Martin. And yet, he's clearly their biggest weapon and is often urgent and wired this evening.

Practically f*cking the piano during the cascading downfall of "Clocks", he spins to the stars during an interstellar "Speed Of Sound" and storms the vague polemic of a rampant "Politik". With "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face", we even find him in the unlikely role of flaky philanderer - "I gotta say, I wasted all your time, honey". Indeed, it's obvious that minus Martin there would be little to see here. Coldplay wear identical black outfits and white shoes as if to emphasis their android roles. Bassist Guy Berryman stands in a spotlight and you wonder who on Earth even knows his name, let alone wants to gaze at him.

Thankfully, guitarist Johnny Buckland is often a mesmeric force. "How You See The World" only truly becomes globe-heavy at the cataclysmic close, while the sky-scraping riff of "Talk" is brutalised deliciously. Elsewhere, the show is given necessary shots of impetus by the invasion of some enormous yellow balloons during "Yellow" and Martin's neat lightbulb-in-orbit trick during the slow emotional explosion of "Fix You", a track which relies more on the build and release dynamics of rave than rock music.

Ultimately, it would be rather churlish to castigate Coldplay for the many alarming, lumbering slo-mo dips between tonight's fireworks, where the absence of ambitious sonic killer on some of "X&Y" is as dumbly obvious as Chris Martin's lyrics, which are now being lifted from the brain-challenged school of Noel Gallagher. However, we do still await that revolution. And a haircut.

by Ben Gilbert