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Glen Matlock Remembers How to Rock, but Nearly Forgets the Songs That Put Him Where He Is
Glen Matlock doesn’t seem to have much time for the past, except the past as he sees it. Cover versions of the New York Dolls, or one or other size of The Faces, are fine. But the songs that he co-wrote? The songs that are responsible for what fame he has — for 200 people being out on a cold, virus-infested night, to see him?
Those songs — that single song, in fact 1 — is relegated to the encore.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping your best-known songs for the encore, of course. But when the ticket site said “Curfew: 10:30,” and it’s 10:27 and there hasn’t been a single Pistols song, you can start to get a bit twitchy.
On the plus side, he did introduce “Pretty Vacant” by saying, “This is ‘SOS’,” referring to his borrowing of the intro riff from the Abba song.
It was a good night, though. His originals and the covers were all fine. It’s just that, if you heard a no-name pub band playing those songs — well, you wouldn’t bother going out specially for it.
The night was billed as “Glen Matlock + Earl Slick.” I’m embarrassed to admit I had to look up who Slick was. Turns out he only replaced Mick Ronson in Bowie’s band, and worked with John & Yoko! And now he’s playing lead guitar in Glen Matlock’s band. Oh well.
- There’s no point in asking what that is. You’ll get no reply. ↩
FotoFebruary, as some on Micro.blog are calling the February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 1 theme: Open.
Why not join Micro.blog and take part?
JetBrains Mono: Equal or Not
I just installed the JetBrains Mono font. We programmers need monospaced fonts, and this is a very nice one. It comes installed with recent versions of JetBrains’s IDEs. My copy of IntelliJ was not recent, it turned out.
Anyway, the most interesting thing is ligatures for programmers. Take a look at this:
You see that “not equals” sign? The crossed-out equals that we were taught to write back in secondary school? That’s not a character in any normal ASCII typeface. Plus, this is Java: even if it were a character (there is a Unicode character for that symbol), it’s not part of the language. The compiler wouldn’t recognise it.
What that actually is is the standard not-equals of C-based languages: !=. But the font has detected it and replaced it with the more attractive and traditional symbol.
It’s a setting you can disable, and I’m not sure I’ll keep it that way, but it’s impressive and unusual.
Christmas Day by the Lea (or Lee)
It’s our family custom on Christmas Day to go for a walk down by the River Lea (usually shown on maps with the addition “or Lee”, as both spellings have been used historically). Often it’s been cold and dreich and we’ve seen almost no-one. Two days ago it was a gorgeous sunny day, and there were hundreds of people out.
And some boats were moving:
While others were just parked:
And this is us; Frances, me, and our two young adults, who don’t normally like to be photographed, and who have never appeared here before:
Where, and in what direction, am I meant to slide? Because I can’t get past this screen in the iPhone camera app “Manual.”
