first show - buffalo bar Islington London

Played the Buffalo Bar - Islington which was directly out from the victoria line underground. literally 20 ft from the escalator exit. I don't have the time or patience here to explain how unthinkably enormous London is. We could ride the underground for well over an hour and still be in London. Not surprisingly, the main room of the club was underground so it was down another flight of stairs to haul all our equipment. The bar was high in atmoshpere, lots of red lights and moody spots set in the ceiling but housed in an older building that was an old fashioned proper pub upstairs. The name of the upper pub? "The Famous Cock". There were 3 bands ahead of us this night so there was plenty of time to kill. The guys who had come to see White Hills previously dropped in to say hi and take us to the most inexpensive and delicious vegetarian indian food I have ever eaten. By inexpensive I mean 3 pounds (or quid I am learning) 60. Roughly that translates into about 6 dollars and change US. It was totally cramped and the 5 of us sat at a table for 3 but the food was truly spectacular. Not only that they had a huge metal tin of that green sauce I love so much that you could just help yourself to. By my account there was some damn good food in london so far. We headed back to the club to set up the merchandise booth and check out the other talent on the bill. The other bands were fairly good, I should add their names later. The band directly before us was letting us use their main equipment; because although we toiled endlessly dragging our guitars (2) effects pedals and cymbals, snare drum, kick pedal and sticks through the underground we still needed amps and the rest of the drums. The band was called 'Eat lights Become Lights' and they were really nice guys but of course things couldn't go without incident because after the second song the guitar amp just died. No smell of burning, no power failure, it just decided to quit working period. So after a few minutes of the drum and bass show while Dave flicked every switch off and on - plugged in and out every cable, and then threw his guitar to the ground in disgust; we got the sound guy to let us run the guitar through the house sound system. He was nice (or drunk) enough to do so, despite the fact that we just killed the guitar amp in 2 songs. The bar itself was much like many rock bars I have played in back in the states; sticky floors, expensive drinks from the glass - cheap from the bottle, and the whole of the mens room had about an inch of liquid on the floor. Someone had thrown down an entire roll of that brown industrial paper towel stuff in order to create a sort of walkway (the brown paper road?) to the stalls and the sink but it had disintegrated long ago and so it was neigh impossible to even identify the liquid. Paper soup is what we dubbed it. We had a good sized crowd to begin with but it being wednesday and almost 1am everyone had pretty much cleared out by the end of the set. We took a cab back to the Generator and passed out in anticipation of our 7am wake up call to make the 9 hour bus ride to Glasgow from London.