Air, The Dome, Brighton<br></br>The Distillers, Brixton Academy, London<br></br>The Boyfriends, Dublin Castle, London

We love you. But go home, please

A trip to the sea air, to see Air. And Air, like air itself, are great to have around you, but nothing much to look at. It's a peculiar concept, this. A genteel audience in a genteel town coming out in their droves to hear the ultimate staying-in music, sitting in rapt attention as background music seizes the foreground.

Make no mistake, the latest Air album, Talkie-Walkie, is a wonderful thing. No other band has Air's knack of blending Floyd/ELP prog with Abba/10cc pop (and I simply don't buy the theory of peaks-and-troughs, or "returns to form", because they've always been this good).

But the more Air's music - complex, sophisticated washes of sound - comes to resemble that of Pink Floyd, the more their visual impact needs to strive for the Floyd's standards. You won't get holographic reconstructions of the Pompeii volcano here. A few swirling vortices of green light, a very few words from Nicolas Godin, the Richard Madeley lookalike who is Air's main singer/guitarist ("Zeess eess 'Surfing On A Rock-ettt'..."), and that's your lot. For a band with so many completely instrumental tracks in their canon, it just won't do.

Air's other main member, Jean Benoit Dunckel, sports one of those white synths you sling around your neck, like Howard Jones used to, but otherwise their visual image, also extended to the new, afro-headed bassist and the longhaired keyboardist in the shadows, is strictly black shirt, black tie, as serious as anything.

Utter seriousness, of course, is the trick to whistling onstage, which is handy, because on at least one Air track, Madeley-bloke is required to give it the full Roger Whitaker (go on, try whistling and smiling at the same time). A straight face also helps when you're delivering lyrics of lust towards a cow, which go "You know how to do it/ Wonder milky bitch..." Air are not completely oblivious to the rules showbiz, saving the hits to the end: a faster, more insistent "Kelly Watch the Stars", and a blinding "Sexy Boy", which defied the prevailing fashions of 1998 by propelling Kraftwerkian synth-rock and Olympian homoeroticism into the Top 10: "Ou sont tes héros aux corps d'athlètes/ Ou sont tes idoles mal rasées, bien habillées..." But next time, I think I'll stay at home, in the carbon monoxide air of London, with my CD.

At the NME Awards show, a quote is projected onto the large screens from the lead singer of The Distillers: "Boys don't like it when you play with their toys," it says. When she was already fairly well-known, Brody Armstrong, inveterate scenester/starshagger, punk queen and frontwoman of mediocre punk revivalists The Distillers, took on the surname Dalle, to lend her Anglo-Saxon identity some exotic, film-star glamour. Well, listen honey, my name's Simon De Niro, and I'm here to tell you it isn't good enough.

The Distillers seem to have scared the punks out from under their rocks. Rosy-cheeked girls with towering Statue of Liberty hairstyles, getting high on Shockwaves fumes because they're too young for anything else, are out in force. Support act Peaches who, ironically, really is sex/drugs/rock'n'roll, gets a battery thrown at her by one of them, because they're so keen to see Dalle.

And for what? A wannabe Courtney Love (who was, of course, the ultimate wannabe... and who'd wanna be a wannabe-wannabe?), who sings like she's gargling Brillo pads, fronting a professionally tight punk-rock band of musos whose every song has an identical "Belly's Gonna Get You" tempo (they need to show fireworks on the screen, because there are none on the stage). The temptation is to say "if I was 13, I'd have been bowled over by this". It would be more honest to say that if I was 13 and really stupid, I might have been bowled over by this. Never in the field of music since Conflict has so much hairspray been wasted by so many for so little.

There's a strong case to be made that camp only has any mileage when used by heterosexuals. Martin Wallace, singer with rising unsigned London band The Boyfriends (who happens to be gay), knows this: 6ft plus, shaven of head, square of jaw, his floral shirt the only concession to femininity, although the teasing band name - Whose boyfriends? Each other's? - is perhaps another.

Guitarist Richard Adderley and drummer Paddy Pulzer, who play with an urgency which sometimes recalls Sumner and Morris in Joy Division, used to be in mid-Nineties mood-rockers Jack. Bassist David Barnett is better known as the official biographer of Suede, whose own guitarist Richard Oakes is watching.

Like Suede, Martin Wallace hails from the hinterlands south of London - Whyteleafe to be precise - where he used to sell sex toys to bored housewives. (Nowadays he mends broken homes and hearts for the council.) And the Suede comparison is more than geographical: with their lines about "making love in stolen cars", they share a similar suburban romanticism. Another reference is The Smiths, of whom Wallace is clearly (sometimes too clearly) a fan: a couplet like "A life spent absorbed in the printed word/ Is simply no good for your mental health" ("No Tomorrow") is inevitably reminiscent of Morrissey's "throw your homework onto the fire" and "there's more to life than books, you know". Indeed, singing in a voice an octave below his natural register (which cracks once or twice), the similarities positively scream at you.

But Wallace also shares Morrissey's onstage self-confidence. A cocky wink here, a hand wave there (but never a smile), he rocks casually on his heels as he threatens, "Holed up here in my room plotting bloody revenge/ I have a plan for you to meet a nasty end" ("Humour Me"), throwing in a slit-throat gesture for good measure. "It's not that I lack self-esteem," he sings tellingly. "It's that it is SO HIGH I cannot understand why I am still on my own..."

s.price@independent.co.uk

Air: Olympia, Dublin (0818719300), tonight; Corn Exchange, Cambridge (01223 357 851), Tuesday; Brixton Academy, London SW9 (0870 771 2000), Wednesday; Guildhall, Southampton (023 8063 2601), Thursday. The Boyfriends: Water Rats, London WC1 (020 7336 7326), Friday