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