OTTAWA - For all the serious talk about how pop music’s changed so over the years, sometimes I think it hasn’t changed at all.

Take Katy Perry, the 26-year-old pop diva who performed at Scotiabank Place on Sunday night to a house full of 14,200 fans. There’s something very 1960s about Perry. She’s a bona fide manufactured pop phenomenon, like the Monkees, The Archies or Josie & The Pussycats, a cartoon, commercial entity of pure pop entertainment. One listen to her conveyor-belt pop, one glance at her candy-coloured glamour and that not too subtle sexuality and you know that she’s been created, like the Bride of Frankenstein, to fill a void in pop-culture’s fickle marketplace.

And Perry does a pretty good job of giving pop music a little fantasy of being young forever.

At least, all the key elements were there at Perry’s Teenage Dream show at Scotiabank Place.

Like Lady Gaga, Perry is known more for her outrageous costumes and theatrics than her music and when she arrives on this cupcake mountain singing Teenage Dream, she’s wearing a proper ’60s mini dress, only with swirling discs on her ta-tas. Fun. Austin Powers funny, and even though Perry sounds sharp, the band sounds wet, but at least I am amused.

Perry’s music wears thin quickly but our little star’s determination to show the fans a good time goes into overdrive. Hummingbird Heartbeat, Wake Up In Vegas are generally forgettable tunes that need visual distractions.

Unfortunately, a dozen dancers and singers in fluorescent wigs and Nurse Betty skirts, or hauling a 17-year-old male fan up on stage shirtless, doesn’t quite cut it without a framing storyline.

Things improve on U R So Gay — with Perry eating a brownie, and her gender-bending anthem I Kissed a Girl. Oh, who hasn’t?

And so it went for much of the night. Surprisingly mediocre music and a flat sound off the board offset by an elaborate but utterly overdone video-theatre-circus show that showed its true colours during Circle The Drain when Perry walked the brightly-coloured set wearing a Catwoman outfit, just like Lee Meriweather did on the Batman TV series.

I thought I’d like this a whole lot more, but it’s only halfway through, she’s talking about loving Canada and some life-changing event, and I’m ready to leave.

By the time she finally got around to the best set pieces - a mocking cover of Rebecca Black's Friday, her hit Hot N Cold, Last Friday Night and a decent cover of Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody, the damage was done. She's so much better on video, I think next time Katie Perry does a live show, I'll wait for the video rental.

I loved opening act Marina & the Diamonds. Marina is a saucy lass who does 1980s electrobeat as if she was Posh Spice, singing the praises of club life, dancing until dawn and drinking champagne the way Eartha Kitt did 30 years earlier.