Elbow have been describing this end-of-year arena tour as their "farewell party", and the reason for their sabbatical is a curious one. Frontman Guy Garvey is to decamp to New York for the first six months of next year to write songs for a stage-musical version of King Kong with Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja.
He leaves with the band's standing at an all-time high. Elbow have this year released only a B-sides compilation, Dead in the Boot, from which they play nothing tonight, yet still the demand for tickets was such that they added a Wembley Arena gig a few nights prior to this O2 show. The scale of the gigs may have changed, but little else has. Reliably rotund, dishevelled and resembling a wedding DJ after a heavy night, the affable Garvey greets the crowd and then ambles along the walkway that bisects them; dressed in a heroically ill-fitting suit, he looks like a man heading for a lunchtime pint and the bookies.
It's this battered everyman persona that helps Elbow transfer their intimate, huge-hearted songs of love and despair to these vast arenas, without sacrificing their piquant intensity. Typical is the fragile The Bones of You, a twitchy, murmured meditation on temps perdus and heartbreak to which it is impossible not to relate.
They claim to have written half of their next album, yet play only one new song tonight, a maudlin throb called Charge. It's introduced by Garvey as coming "from the point of view of an old man in a young person's bar", which is quintessential Elbow. Older numbers such as Mirrorball and Puncture Repair are dispatched with what can only be described as ferocious tenderness.
Garvey, who entertainingly comperes the evening in the style of an arena-rock Peter Kay, has not lost the common touch. Learning that it's an audience member's birthday, he presents him with a treasured guitar; after successfully orchestrating a mass O2-wide Mexican wave, he deadpans: "Let's celebrate with a song about dead friends," before crooning a charged The Night Will Always Win.
A two-hour set that could hardly be any more all-inclusively communal closes with a mass singalong of Open Arms, before Elbow encore with the self-doubting love pledge of Starlings, and a fervent, expansive version of their signature tune, One Day Like This. It's been a sumptuous evening: the Manhattan monster's gain will be our loss.
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