In Manchester, the town where Roy Keane became a household name, they’ve been shouting “KEANO!” since Tom Chaplin was a boy. Tonight though, the chant found itself a new arena. “Now he’s retired, I suppose we can lay claim to it,” smiled the Keane frontman.

This was only Chaplin’s second show since emerging from a six-week spell at The Priory battling alcohol and drug addiction — and he made no attempt to conceal how much he had missed the validation that the day job brings. “I want to feel some love,” he declared, beckoning the audience to him after a titanically charged Better Put it Behind You.

Often it seemed as though every line that left his lips resonated with new meaning. Even songs predating this year’s Under the Iron Sea album weren’t spared from this sort of emotional revisionism. Everybody’s Changing — the 2004 single borne of an earlier nadir, when the Sussex trio were label-less and broke — assumed a pealing urgency that belied the hundreds of times they have had to play it.

If much of that time has been characterised by intra-band tensions, that’s hardly surprising. However viscerally chief songsmith Tim Rice-Oxley pounded his keyboard (from afar it looked as though he was trying to tenderise a steak with his bare hands), Chaplin remains the main channel of communication between those songs and the audience.

The mutual dependence between introspective composer and exhibitionist frontman was well illustrated by Rice-Oxley’s wartime lament A Bad Dream. As footage of ballroom-dancing couples in gas masks played above him, Chaplin sank to his knees and unleashed a hair-raising delivery of the song.

Undeterred by three years in which detractors have dismissed his group as Coldplay imitators, the singer donned acoustic guitar and pretended to be Chris Martin for a snatch of Yellow. Resisting Manchester’s exhortations to carry on, he played Your Eyes Open and asked the audience to sing along, all the better “to cover up my appalling guitar playing”.

He needn’t have worried. Keane fans sing about as well as Chaplin plays guitar — that is to say, with untutored gusto. Indeed, he was surplus to requirements on Somewhere Only We Know. Sung in unison, the band’s debut single sounded strangely like a Methodist hymn. His period in rehab may have ended, but the group therapy continues on a nightly basis.

For tour details, go to: www.keanemusic.com