Hard Rock Cafe celebrates ten years on Buchanan Street

Buchanan Street’s home of rock and roll memorabilia and loaded burgers is celebrating its tenth anniversary. The Hard Rock Cafe opened in Glasgow’s city centre in November 2013, taking over the former Athenaeum Theatre and becoming the 139th venue of its kind globally. For a city steeped in such rich musical culture as this one, the venue is a foreground for highlighting our achievements. 

Speaking to General Manager, Gordy Aitken, on the cafe’s own backstory and the pieces of memorabilia it showcases, he said: “Go back to 1971, the first Hard Rock Cafe opened down in London. It was just a place that people could go and hang out, it wasn’t for posh people, it wasn’t a greasy spoon, it was somewhere in between. One day, people like Eric Clapton, people like Pete Townsend, they’d be at the bar, having a drink, hanging out, chatting about whatever they wanted too. And then they got quite famous and Eric Clapton decided he wanted to mark his spot at the bar, so he asked the bartender if he could put his red Fender there. 

“About three weeks later a box arrived with a little note from Pete Townsend that said ‘if you can put his guitar behind the bar, you can put my guitar behind the bar too’. So they put Pete Townsend’s Flying V behind the bar too. If you were to go into the old Park Lane Cafe today, those two guitars are still behind the bar to mark their spots and that’s how the memorabilia started.

“Fast forward to ten years ago we were looking to open up a cafe in Glasgow, we were looking for the right location for years, literally 15 years since the cafe in Edinburgh, the other Scottish cafe, opened. Luckily we got this amazing, amazing old theatre - the Athenaeum on Buchanan Street, and then we started piecing the puzzles together about how the cafe would look, ‘what important pieces of memorabilia are we going to put on the walls to really showcase what is unique about this city?’.

“A couple of great pieces of memorabilia that we have in this cafe - firstly we’ve got Angus Young from ACDC’s Gibson SG. An iconic Scottish/Australian rock band. We think they’re Scottish but they emigrated to Australia. Every single guest who walks through this restaurant walks past this guitar when they arrive, it’s stunning. But it’s also coupled with it’s trademark schoolboy outfit, it’s just amazing.

“Another great piece of memorabilia that we have is KT Tunstall’s Epiphone Firebird located in the main part of the restaurant. She used it in one of her music videos ‘Hold On’ and then she donated it to our Edinburgh cafe for their tenth anniversary 15 years ago, and then since we’ve acquired it and it’s now for every guest to see in the main restaurant just to the right of our stage.