Like a cup-winning football team on a victory parade, Elbow are celebrating last month's Mercury music prize success with a triumphal UK tour.

Hardly a song went by at the Roundhouse without the Manchester band raising a glass to their fans. A cascade of glitter and balloons fell during their anthem "One Day Like This", which climaxed with football terrace-style choruses about new dawns breaking. Just as their songs dramatise sudden swells of euphoria in humdrum life, so too Elbow's fortunes are on a giddy upturn.

They opened with "Starlings", from their Mercury-winning album The Seldom Seen Kid. Victorious trumpet fanfares punctuated a gentle ode about courtship, with genial singer Guy Garvey personifying a rumpled, hungover thirtysomething everyman imploring a second chance: "So yes, I guess I'm asking you/To back a horse that's good for glue and nothing else."

The parallels with Elbow's career are unmissable. Following three critically praised but commercially stuttering albums, The Seldom Seen Kid was recorded in conditions of quiet desperation. It was self-financed, the band having parted company with their record label, and its yearning nature speaks of the hush before the last throw of the dice.

Since the Mercury victory the album's sales have increased sevenfold and a wave of public affection has engulfed the underdogs-made-good. The celebratory mood at the Roundhouse provided a perfect setting for the songs' themes of dead ends and renewal.

Garvey, a bear-like man with a hoarse high tenor croon, conducted proceedings with dry good humour, directing us to serenade a pregnant woman in the audience and taking issue with the band's nice guy image - "We're nasty, bad-ass, rock 'n' roll guys" - before introducing a song about "coming home to your mum".

The music belonged to the same aching epic rock tradition as Coldplay, Snow Patrol and their ilk, but played with vastly greater imagination and lyricism. "Mirrorball" was a swooning lullaby about love. "Newborn" climaxed with an elemental storm of organ swirls and wordless cries. Big subjects were tackled ("Here's a song about crushing alcohol abuse," Garvey cheerily announced) yet the atmosphere never grew ponderous. Following in the footsteps of Joy Division and The Smiths, Elbow are the silver lining in Manchester's great tradition of miserabilism.