Arctic Monkeys may have alienated some by progressing from the “chip shop rock and roll,” in the words of frontman Alex Turner. He is no longer a teenager singing and writing about Sheffield taxi ranks, Ford Mondeos and fake tan. Album sales and charting singles may have inevitably fallen since 2006, but his enduring lyrical wit was evident to the 40,000 fans witnessing their first two nights at London’s O2 Arena.

They walked on, with no pyrotechnics or special effects, to the sound of Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’. Opening with recent hit ‘Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair’, the crowd reacted to the riff alone with jubilance. Nobody really knows what tongue-in-cheek lyrics like “go into business with a grizzly bear” mean, but every word echoed around the arena, along with the triumphant chorus. Turner has never been a particularly talkative frontman, but combated the show’s impersonal nature by greeting the crowd as the Millennium Dome. “Are you going to have a good time with us tonight?” Things were then taken up a frantic level by Favourite Worst Nightmare singles ‘Teddy Picker’ and ‘Brianstorm’, with smooth transitions in between.

The newer material slotted in well with their early work, despite being less punchy. Turner introduced the opinion-dividing ‘Brick by Brick’, a basic, raw anthem, by saying “love it or hate it, you’re wrong.” Released as a teaser to fourth album Suck it and See, it is very much a red herring alongside the band’s most summery, melodic material. ‘The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala’, magnificently titled, includes some of Turner’s wittiest wordplay. Its darker and heavier predecessor Humbug was less well represented in the setlist, but fan favourites ‘Dance Little Liar’ and ‘Pretty Visitors’ went down well. The huge sea of people dispersed to form enormous mosh pits, as drunken fans crashed into one another.

The likes of ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’ and ‘A Certain Romance’ may have been put to one side, but their record-breaking debut album was also given a good run out. ‘Still Take You Home’, ‘The View from the Afternoon’ and ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, with their pounding drums and barrage of power chords, got the whole arena singing again. Thousands were bouncing and overpriced beer was flying everywhere. It was glorious.

Following a triumphant rendition of ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’, The O2 simultaneous erupted with closer ‘When the Sun Goes Down’. From the moment Turner struck that opening ‘B’ chord on his guitar, the O2 simultaneously erupted. After an encore of current single ‘Suck it and See’, and a similarly slow version of old favourite ‘Mardy Bum’, Turner announced “Jimmy Savile, rest in peace”. He then “fixed it” by introducing his Last Shadow Puppets band-mate Miles Kane, who joined them for finisher ‘505’.

For a band that can hardly be classified as arena rock, attracting a much wider demographic that you might expect, Arctic Monkeys made their first shows at The O2 look easy. To quote one of their lyrics, “Anticipation has a habit to set you for disappointment in evening entertainment, but tonight there’ll be some love/Tonight there’ll be a ruckus regardless of what’s been before.”