Live: Travails of a Coldplay fan. Coldplay, Emirates Stadium.

It’s difficult being a Coldplay fan: you sort of love to hate yourself, spending half your life trying to run away from the fact that, yes, you really do get down to Viva La Vida. But so what, I'm a desperate nomad – an emotional wreck of a man who finds sentiment in even the darkest corners of Coldplay's back catalogue. And you, you bastard, you non-fan, you're not worthy. So fuck you, haters. I went to the Emirates and loved it, and in the following few paragraphs I might even explain why.

“We’re going to give you ever fucking ounce,” arks Chris Martin into the mic, leaning towards an audience 60,000-strong. “Let’s make the rest of London ask what the hell is happening here”.

Let’s get one thing straight: Coldplay are awesome. They put on a cracking live show, know how to entertain a crowd, and are likeable (enough) characters to live outside the world of rabby indie rockstar cool. They're distinguishable enough to actually, kind of, in some very odd way, like and there's something fresh about that, especially in a market ful of dull, oversized stadium artists. I’ll be the first to admit us Coldplay fans are a weird breed – a daft mix of old dears, lads in Polos, and teary-eyed twentysomethings – but we do well; we manage. So what happens when you put us all together in the Emirates? Does the world end? Do we all collectively imagine a life where our secret crush on Chris Martin is something we may express openly and freely?

So this collective get together; this moment of peace and calm amongst a world of rage and Coldplay hate: what's it feel like? Well, as a man with no sense of anything whose existence is spent clawing away at the stickers adorning the tattered walls of train carriages, I can, with confidence, reliably inform you that it was PARA-PARA-PARADISE.

Cringe. I’m sorry.

From the deadpan tone of Warning Sign that, even when bellowed out of the Emirates' tinny speakers to 60,000 seemed a strangely teary affair, to the predictable inclusion of raging new favourites Charlie Brown and the aforesaid Paradise – one after the other don’t cha' know – the Emirates crowd witnessed a whirlwind of the unexpected, the expected, the old and the new.  But by the time the last few chords of Every Teardrop called a post-Fix You close, it was to be the end of our collective moment of peace. The end of an evening spent forgetting the pain, and the suffering, of what it's like to be a Coldplay fan out in the real world.

So we left. It rained. And we sang..

“Lights will g-g-g-g-guide you home...”

Robbie Wojciechowski. Photography courtesy of Nick Pickles.