It's not often you get former Stone Roses singer Ian Brown, BBC creative director Alan Yentob and reality TV boy band JLS in the same room.

Then again, it’s not often the world’s most popular rapper, Shawn Jay-Z Carter, plays an intimate London show.

In his spare time, Carter is Beyoncé Knowles’s husband and co-owner of New Jersey Nets basketball team, two sports bars and a clothing brand, but this week his album The Blueprint 3 became his 11th consecutive American chart topper.

In Britain the story is rather different. Run This Town might have given him his first number-one single this month, but until The Blueprint 3 debuts next week, the 38-year-old New Yorker who earned $35 million last year has only had one top 20 album: a collaboration with America’s silliest grungateers, Linkin Park.

Yet, much to the peevish chagrin of Noel Gallagher — who was most certainly not present last night — Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury 2008 and, just to show who has the last laugh, he closed his set proper by cheekily miming along to Oasis’s original Wonderwall. You had to laugh: imagining the steam whooshing out of Gallagher’s ears made it more chucklesome still.

Alas, a distinctly muddy sound rendered much of his and rapping sidekick Memphis Bleek’s whiplash vocal interplay redundant, but with two drummers, a brass section, some coruscating guitars and banks of keyboards, this was the rockiest hip-hop show I’ve seen. If Jay-Z’s ego is no match for Kanye West’s, his swagger and exuberance, allied to that gung-ho but watertight band, plus fabulous giant screen visuals — including, at one incongruous point, footage of Kurt Cobain in instrument-smashing mode — combined to make a thrilling spectacle, especially on the New York triple whammy, Heart Of The City (Ain’t No Love), Run This Town and Empire State Of Mind.

With midnight approaching (recording Jonathan Ross’s show meant he joined us at 10.30pm), he spent the encore rattling through staples including the mighty 99 Problems and the clatter of Big Pimpin’, before spending 10 bizarre minutes thanking audience members with fortune cookie homilies: “Man in the red shirt, don’t take no shit from no one now ... yo, girl in the front row, baby I love you...”

We can only imagine what on earth Coldplay fans will make of this when Jay-Z supports them at Wembley Stadium tonight and tomorrow.