Long before he took to selling it on the TV, John Lydon used to take delight in smearing butter on his face to aid the growth of any emerging spots. On the first night of Coldplay’s British tour, Chris Martin had skincare issues of a different nature. Sitting at an upright piano while his band took a breather, the singer bemoaned the luck that brought “a spot the size of the Isle of Wight” in time for their grand homecoming.

Veterans of the punk wars – indeed, anyone who feels that pop music has long since lost its edge – would no doubt have invested significance in Martin’s facial cleansing crisis. But if you saw the way events unfolded at Sheffield, you wouldn’t need to be told that the truth is more complicated. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its containing their most adventurous music to date, the group’s fourth album – Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends – has yielded a rapturous response from American audiences.

Until Martin, a man for whom the adjective “spring-heeled” was surely coined, skipped into action over the pounding industrial folk balladry of Violet Hill, there was no reason to believe that British crowds might be any different. And yet, to gaze out on to the floor, you could have been fooled into thinking that no one had heard the new songs. If a happy-go-lucky Martin was thrown by the stationary throng before him, though, he didn’t show it. The spectral skeleton-rattle of Cemeteries of London – a song that, a week previously in Colorado, had elicited a deafening ovation – seemed to be met with bafflement. All of which led you to conclude that the group’s Yorkshire constituency were primarily here for the sonorous mid-paced anthems – Clocks, In My Place, Fix You – for which the quartet are best known. Yet, when the evening kicked off in earnest, it was for Viva La Vida, a song narrated from the perspective of a deposed dictator, whose chamber-pop arrangement owes more to Michael Nyman than anything to trouble the pop charts in recent decades. This was the moment that hundreds of shaven-headed fortysomething men steadied their plastic double-pinters with one hand while punching the air with the other.

A bizarre tipping point, then, but a tipping point nonetheless. Utilising the whole stadium, the four, dressed in their now-familiar quasi-French revolutionary garb, ran off stage through faintly startled fans and reappeared on a tiny platform amid the upper stands at the back of the venue. Playing acoustically with the drummer, Will Champion, switching to guitar and the bassist, Guy Berryman, on mandolin, they delivered an achingly spare version of The Scientist, made none the worse for Martin’s realisation that you could sing Take That’s Back for Good over the same chords.

A thunderous Lovers in Japan marked a brief return to the stage. “Lovers, keep on the road you’re on,” exhorted Martin over a vast rhythmic upswell akin to a goods train hurtling through space. Then, from the rafters, a rain of maybe a million paper butterflies. The band blamed by many for ushering in an era of polite, soul-baring popsmiths, from Snow Patrol to James Blunt, have moved on. With British dates only just under way, there has never been a better time for their detractors to do the same.

Coldplay play Birmingham NIA, Dec 1-3

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