Glasgow’s Hard Rock Cafe celebrates its 10th anniversary

The Hard Rock Cafe has been on Buchanan Street for ten years, paying tribute to rock legends across the world and in Scotland.

Transcript

00:00 Today we are celebrating our 10th anniversary in Glasgow, situated on Buchanan Street on

00:07 the 16th of November and we're going to talk about the memorabilia of the Hard Rock Cafe.

00:12 So go back to 1971, the first Hard Rock Cafe opened on Old Park Lane down in London. It

00:19 was just a place that people could go and hang out. It wasn't for posh people, it wasn't

00:23 a greasy spoon, it was somewhere in between. And then one day, there were people like Eric

00:28 Clapton, people like Pete Townsend, they'd be at the bar having a drink, hanging out,

00:33 chatting about whatever they wanted to, and then they got quite famous. And then Eric

00:39 Clapton decided, "I want to mark my spot at the bar." So he asked the bartender if he

00:44 could put his red Fender behind the bar just to mark his spot. So they went, "Cool, why

00:49 not?" Put it behind the bar. About three weeks later, in a box, arrived with a little note

00:54 from Pete Townsend saying, "Well, if you can put his guitar behind the bar, you put mine

00:58 behind the bar too." And so they put Pete Townsend's Flying V behind the bar as well.

01:03 If you were to go into the Old Park Lane Cafe today, those two guitars are still behind

01:08 the bar to mark their spots. And that's how the memorabilia started.

01:11 And then fast forward to 10 years ago, we decided to open up a cafe in Glasgow. We've

01:16 been looking for the right location for years, literally 15 years since the cafe in Edinburgh,

01:22 the other Scottish cafe opened. We couldn't find the right spot, but luckily we've got

01:25 this amazing, amazing old theatre, the Athenaeum and Buchanan Street. And then we started piecing

01:33 the puzzles together about how the cafe is going to look, but importantly, which pieces

01:36 of memorabilia are we going to put on the walls to really showcase what's unique about

01:43 this city. So then what we've got here is our Scottish

01:46 wall where various different Scottish artists, we already had the pieces of memorabilia in

01:51 our warehouse, which is over in the States, but we brought them over and put them on the

01:56 wall to showcase exactly what we wanted to with our Scottish wall.

01:59 A couple of great pieces of memorabilia that we have in this cafe. Firstly, you've got

02:05 Angus Young from ACDC's, Gibson SG, iconic Scottish Australian rock band. We think they're

02:12 Scottish because they were all born here, but then they emigrated to Australia. Every

02:15 single guest who walks through this restaurant as they arrive, walks past this guitar. It's

02:20 stunning, but it's also coupled with his trademark schoolboy outfit. It's just amazing.

02:25 Another great piece of memorabilia that we have is Katie Tunstall's Epiphone Firebird

02:29 located in the main part of the restaurant. She used it in one of our music videos called

02:33 Hold On, and then she donated it to our Edinburgh cafe for their 10th anniversary, 15 years

02:40 ago. But then since we've acquired it, and it's now for every guest to see in the main

02:45 restaurant just to the right of our stage. So in the cafe itself, we've got upwards of

02:50 a hundred pieces of memorabilia. Quite a lot of them are local to us. Some are international,

02:55 but quite a lot are local to us in Scotland. From some contemporary artists, you've got

03:00 Katie Tunstall, you've got Frightened Rabbit, to other artists such as Rod Stewart, Wet

03:06 Wet Wet, Donovan even, and then onto ACDC. So we've got a real eclectic mix of different

03:12 pieces of music history just on the walls within this cafe.