‘Live fast, die old’ ran the strapline to the David Brent: Life On The Road film a decade ago. The movie itself was a textbook example of how unwise it is to attempt to cash in on the earlier (read: much funnier) successes of your career.
Not that Ricky Gervais gives a damn while residing in his Hampstead mansion, of course. As increasingly pompous as his persona now is, I’ve finally reached a place where I know I’d rather have a night out with Brent than with his creator. There would be pathos. But there would at least be lager. Although I’m certain that a 2025 London ‘big’ night out with Slough’s finest former paper salesman would almost certainly take place at the Hard Rock Café.
These days the rock ’n’ roll-themed diner is very much David Brent in restaurant form. Its core audience can be reduced to two types of person. The first are ageing tourists from Missouri to Mumbai who want to take a peek at Sting’s guitar before ordering a massive, and entirely tasteless, burger that comes with coleslaw and salad that’s more disastrously dressed than a blindfolded Noddy Holder let loose in Zandra Rhodes’s wardrobe. The other type are photocopier, paper and property salesmen from Reading, Guildford and, yes, Slough, who are ‘in London’ for a conference in some airless three-star hotel in Acton and have decided to head to Hyde Park to drink warm beer from the bottle before finding out if the clip joint scene is still extant around Brewer Street.
Brent is the latter, though he would like to be deep in the bosom of the former of these groups. But it may not be long before he and his non-fictitious brethren have to find somewhere else to congregate for an evening of BBQ bacon cheeseburgers, eaten to a soundtrack of AC/DC.
Last week, the UK division of the Hard Rock Café reported pre-tax losses of £5.8 million in 2024, compared with a loss of just £1 million in 2023. Revenue declined to £29.1 million, compared with £32.5 million the year before. Not only that, but the Newcastle and Glasgow branches have both shut down at short notice over the past year, joining Hard Rocks in Paris, Ibiza and Fortaleza who are also now serving up loaded fries in the sky to Moon, Morrison and Mercury etc.
Established in 1971, the Hard Rock Café is now in its mid-fifties, and has aged no better than any member of REO Speedwagon or the Eagles. The brand cite operational expenses, high energy bills and increased borrowing costs for the current malaise and have stated they believe they’re in a strong position to recover.
The Hard Rock Café is now in its mid-fifties, and has aged no better than any member of REO Speedwagon or the Eagles
But this reaction feels and sounds as hollow as the kind of over-eager interviews given by middle-aged rock stars in the 1980s who claimed that their new synth-drenched album was their best yet and ‘easily the equal’ to their 1960s output. Nobody believed Mick Jagger and the bombastic press releases when the Rolling Stones released the appalling Dirty Work album in 1986, and I don’t believe the Hard Rock Café bosses now either.
Aside from the execrable food (sampled last week for lunch by myself in a purely research-based experiment), the vibe in the flagship London HRC on my visit reminded me of a deeply tragic night I spent in the Mayfair branch of the Playboy Club a decade ago watching Matt Goss perform for the bewildered-looking guests (reader, I was one of them) of the Las Vegas Tourism Board.
Just like the men idling around the pulchritudinous bunnies that night, the air of desperation among the Hard Rock clientele and staff alike was palpable. The music playlist was asinine, the memorabilia was mainly by artists who have little contemporary currency (does anyone in 2025 really want to see Madonna’s bustier or Axl Rose’s leather jacket?) and the gift shop made M&M World on Leicester Square look considered and thoughtful by comparison.
Rock ’n’ roll with the addition of corporate marketing usually does make money for those involved. But even Elton John knew when he’d finally ridden the nostalgia tour circuit for long enough. Old Reg avoided extreme indignity by the thinnest foundation cap of his wig. Yet for the Hard Rock Café, still refusing to bow out gracefully, a worse fate awaits. These days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate the experience of eating at the Hard Rock with an evening in an Angus Steakhouse: the West End dining graveyard for the unlucky, the desperate and the permanently confused.
The Hard Rock Café needs to hang up its leather jacket and overly tight jeans. Just like the stars whose lives and riffs it claims to celebrate, it has become old, flabby and overly obsessed with its own mythology. When that happens to anything or anyone, whether it be a power chord die-hard or a putative corporate diner, the solution is retirement, not more baby back ribs.
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