On record, the music of Architecture In Helsinki can convince you it has some of the artful innocence of Jonathon Richman, or Belle & Sebastian at their best. But somewhere in the planning of their live show they mistook infantilism for innocence.

The innocence that Jonathon Richman and Brian Wilson explored came to them in brief flashes amidst the pain of trying to reconnect with a lost childhood. It went hand in hand with the madness of being lost in an emotional wilderness. It doesn’t have anything to do with spokey-dokes, or windmills, or fucking ice creams. For middle class kids to play with and fabricate that innocence – that was for Richman or Wilson, hard won and fought for - without acknowledging the pain it goes hand in hand with is reprehensible.

Jammed between knee-sock-wearing girls with pigtails, and boys in striped t-shirts politely sipping orange juice, I had a fairy good idea of how the AIH gig was going to unfold. I wasn’t feeling very charitable, in fact the circus of inoffensive supports made me feel downright furious. Hear! Qua and his Incredible Performing Laptop! See! Ninety-Nine and their Serious Facial Expressions! Marvel at the fact that they Never Make Eye Contact With The Audience! Wince! As the ‘Hilarious’ Town Bike Girls dancing troupe make Total Idiots out of themselves! I say, Matron, dancing with dildos – how terribly risqué.

By the time the curtains were drawn on AIH, I was praying for salvation. A little girl was spotted hovering around onstage – perhaps they’re going to sacrifice her to their pagan god, I thought. If they don’t, I will. The stage was decked with hand-cutout red and blue circles of paper, suspended from hobby string. Was this Grade 2 amateurism intended, or just indicative of the show to come? When AIH finally hit the stage, the answer was clear. The thing is, they don’t hit the stage so much as gently caress it. Everything AIH do is so cloyingly cute, you want to take their school-kid glockenspiel and clobber them over the head with it.

Everything - from the Minnie Mouse-esque microphone technique of the Pippi Longstocking-styled Tara, Kellie and Isobel, to the Very Special Person vocals of Cameron Bird, in his school-boy-shorts - is coy, like a little girl balling her fists when told no, she can’t get an ice-cream. The performance itself is marred by amateurism: bad tempo hand-clapping, tone-deaf harmonies, dinky xylophones. Interestingly, about five rows of punters back into the room, people are still talking and drinking, which says something about just how much stage presence AIH actually have. Six songs into their interminable twinkling, I am jamming a beer bottle under the feet of the idiot bopping in front of me, hoping that he’ll fall over. Only the spirited Lighter Of Fires and Like A Call have any kind of spunk. Sooner or later it all peters to a close with no fanfare, like a blackout candle blowing out once the power is restored and no one cares anymore.

All in all, it’s as though punk never happened. To perform and write pop music that doesn’t reflect an element of the culture and society that creates it is to miss the point. You don’t have to write about Redfern or Soweto, but to perpetuate a mythic ‘everything-is-fine-and-dandy’ theme – especially when things clearly aren’t - is stupid and misguided. The best pop music alleviates your troubles without denying they exist. Architecture In Helsinki performs in some kind of kindergarten nativity bubble, with a false innocence borne of a Hallmark Cards sponsored vision of a pop utopia.
Poor old Johnny Rotten. The King is gone, and he is forgotten.