For Thom Yorke, Chicken Licken of the post-industrial meltdown, it's a portent of impending Armageddon. For Fran Healy, it's moral payback, a sign of the planet's karmic balance. For Coldplay though, it's just rain. Good for the plants. A blessing of nature. Something you have to] live with. And when you're willing to get up on stage and sing, "We live in a beautiful world", then you might as well just open the door, tip your head back, and get wet.

Officially, this is Coldplay's first proper headline tour; more correctly, it's a one-band pitch from the Hope Revivalist tent. From the first glimpse of eager audience members clutching silver marker pens and ready-to-sign CDs, it's clearly a mesage spreading like mildfire. By the time quietly effervescent singer Chris Martin closes his eyes to sing 'Shiver', it's tipped over the edge of 'gig' and into the realms of the evangelical. It's easy to see why - songs that gently trap the billowing grandeur of Radiohead and The Verve under the tarpaulin of Travis' all-weather are pretty much today's definition of consesus politics. More vitally, though, Coldplay offer a chance to cut free of cynicism, swerving the intellectual hoops in favour of a clear emotional run. It's the kind of approach that normally means a band have all the mental rigour of a blancmange and the ideology of a beanie hat but, somehow, Coldplay carry it off.

Maybe it's because they lok so wholesome, glowing with such farm-fresh health you'd serve them Sunday lunch. Maybe it's the excitable way in which Chris declares that this is his hometown gig, or asks everyoneto say hello to his parents, or announces to happy applause, "This is great! It's what you dream of at school!" so cheery and guileless you really hope someone's warned him about talking to strangers. Maybe, though, it's just the superb guitar instincts of 'Yellow', not so much lovestruck as punch-drunk, Chris throwing back his head to sing of stars, synaesthesia and selfless devotion. It's not the only potential crossover-classic they play tonight: 'Don't Panic' - the very essence of in-the-church-hall-if-wet resilience - brings to mind fireworks and shooting stars and all the other staple metaphors of windswept guitar passion, while the sweeping spiriual 'Everything's Not Lost' is straight from the 'Everybody Hurts' school of desk-calendar truism, and all the more effective for it. It's about communication, pure and simple. About refusing to recognise that's an impossible contradiction.

So far, then, Coldplay give us no spin, staright-edges, emotional transparancy - you might be forgiven for thinking they had a career as a set square rather than rock 'n' roll messiahs. It's fair to say the things you look for in a band are not the things you want in your life: for example, you probably wouldn't want Iggy Pop anywhere near your carpets, and coming home, and coming home to find someone had rearranged your kitchen in a new and challenging post-utensils form isn't an essential benchmark of domestic life. Equally, there's something undeniably irritating about a band who try quite so hard to be ordinary, who would rather offer up the drippy piano apologies of 'Trouble' than face up to a hammer-and-tongs fight, who tell the audience with such merry shrugging "we haven't got all the answers", when the best bands have you believing they have a smudged copy of the Book of Life under their beds.

Yet resistance, if not futile, is churlish. As an encore, they career through 'You Only Live Twice' - "Once for yourself/Once for your dreams" - ridiculous optimists to the last. The sky might be falling in, but for Coldplay, it's just a shower.

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