T minus 3 hours:

The sound setup in the Subway, despite its "dingy club" shtick, was pretty good. Dougie the sound guy was straightforward and efficient, and the combined Monkey/Proxy crew sorted everything out with a minimum of fuss. It's incredible how smoothly it went, really - no-one forgot anything important; we had spare cables a go-go and Mart didn't short any amps.

So with everything sorted out, we waited. And waited. And got bored, so we started plinking away with each other's instruments (ladies, I know how long you've waited to hear that). Then we waited some more.

And finally, they came. By the time it was time for us to play, the place was heaving. By the takings afterwards, there must have been about 40 people or so, but it felt like a hell of a lot more! We took to the stage, got ourselves sorted out and after Dave's one bit of prerehearsed chat, launched into Vertigo.

It'd take screeds of monotonous rambling to dissect the set song by song, so I won't bother. In general, I think we played better than at the Outhouse. At the Outhouse, I'd been fairly tense and anxious to play well - ironically, relaxing, and thinking less about it meant that I ended up playing better.

We're really starting to get the measure of our own songs now. The new song, Dead On, has sounded good from the start and we played it at least as well as during any rehearsals. It's the first one we've done that has a really quantifiable feel - something like a cross between new wave and traditional rock.

(In other news, I've started using phrases like "quantifiable feel" with a straight face. Hot damn.)

Happy 2/34^th Birthday, despite coming initially together in about 15 minutes, has been something of a problem child since then. We'd spent hours trying to do something right with it until the second last rehearsal, where we stripped it down to its bare bones, dropped it by a tone, added everything back in again, and suddenly it worked. I really enjoyed playing it at the gig; that's probably a mix of relief that we were playing a good version and satisfaction at pretty much getting the bassline right...

Proxy came on after a brief interlude, and my word: they rocked. Great stuff. They were all brilliant, but I think Iain is possibly the best non-professional drummer I've seen. I think Proxy have a bit of a Dave Grohl on their hands! No doubt Andy will wax lyrical about Proxy's performance (as well he should) so I'll leave that to him.

The high that you get from coming off the stage after a successful gig (and by successful I mean the crowd demands that I get naked) is incredible. I'd happily have gone straight back up to do it all again and I think I have you lot to thank for that - thanks for coming along, thanks for stumping up the entry fee, and thanks for making us feel appreciated!