As days go, yesterday wasn’t an especially good one for Coldplay. Still bedraggled after flying in from Japan, Britain’s most popular band and the British music industry’s most popular export spent the evening being humiliated at the Brits, an unfathomable snub which almost single-handedly illustrates why the music business is in steep decline.

Wounded, Coldplay hot-footed it to the newly christened O2 Shepherds Bush Empire and at 40 minutes into today, they took the stage and things finally began to look better.

More pictures: Hits & misses at the Brits
More pictures: All the winners at the Brit Awards

The event was a benefit to celebrate the War Child charity’s 15th birthday and nominally a co-headline with The Killers, who hurtled through their hits, asked us whether we were “human or dancer” (er, a bit of both, I suppose, all things considered) on Human and proved once more that however peculiar their little singer Brandon Flowers is, they remain a formidable live proposition. Yet, Brits idiocy notwithstanding, Coldplay remain the people’s choice and even the late start failed to stop more than 200,000 people applying for the opportunity to purchase the 2,000 £50 tickets. Indeed, such was the demand that while U2’s The Edge managed to wangle himself entry, he couldn’t get a seat.

Coldplay specialise in making giant venues seem small. In a more intimate setting, buoyed rather than burdened by expectation, they were magnificent, whether it was Chris Martin singing much of In My Place sitting on the corner of the stage like a broken schoolboy; the thumping Viva La Vida (were there a Best Use Of Timpani Brit last night, they’d have been celebrating today) which Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant gleefully conducted from the audience; Yellow, stopped by Martin to announce the presence of X-Factor judge Louis Walsh or 42, as it exploded from a piano ballad into near rock opera. Like no other band, they can simultaneously comfort and thrill.

“This,” promised Martin, not one to knowingly undersell himself or his band, “is going to be the best encore you’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t, but it was special. Gary Barlow, looking every inch the Cheshire cat as he basked in credibility, emerged to sing Take That’s Back For Good with Martin on wailing backing vocals and, finally, to send us off into the early morning with a spring in our step, Barlow, Bono and The Killers joined the headliners on a ramshackle but heartfelt assault on Flowers’s All These Things That I’ve Done.

Who needs a Brit anyway?