THE HARD ROCK Cafe is opening an outlet in Newcastle, but they can expect an angry reception from at least one local operator.
The chain of themed diners stretches across the globe - from Boston to Bombay - but Benwell man Barry Greaves says: "Come and have a go it you think you’re hard enough."
His Rock Hard Café has been trading in Newcastle’s West End for over thirty years and he reckons the town isn’t big enough for the both of them.
The two businesses are strikingly similar. The Hard Rock Café spends millions each year buying up memorabilia once owned by the world’s leading rock stars, while Greaves has dipped into his pension to purchase things that once belonged to local legends.
The Hard Rock Café owns several of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars, while the Rock Hard Café has the very baseball bat used by Big Bobby Muldoon to twat a security guard at the nearby Midland Bank.
"Cost me an arm and a leg," says Greaves. "Same as it cost the guard."
When the Hard Rock Café first opened in London, in 1971, Barry Greaves says he had already been trading for a month. His gaff, on Benwell’s Bullion Lane, soon began attracting the right clientele.
"We’ve had them all in here, pal," says Greaves. "I’m not naming no names, but you know who I mean."
"I can mind the time when the McRae Twins came up on the number 35 bus, to muscle in on our domino sessions. They got whacked, put in a bin bag, and sent back in a NODA taxi," he confides.
"Still got the knuckle duster in a box," he says, pointing at the formidable range of hard-knock memorabilia adorning his walls.
It sits alongside the machete that Little Johnny Horsecock used to peel the face off a bloke in a bar who spilt his drink. "Lovely lad Johnny," says Greaves. "Just couldn’t tolerate a mess."

Some of the memorabilia on show at the Rock Hard Cafe

Thrice-widowed Greaves, 72, is helped out around the place by his current wife Kelly-Marie, aged 22, who does the cooking and cleaning. And the plastering, decorating, roofing, and works on the door.
"The door work is the hardest for her," says Greaves. "It can get proper rough around here of an afternoon – me previous wives couldn’t hack it. But she’s more than a wife, she’s a proper henchwoman," he adds, affectionately.
"I do a lot of work in the community what never gets reported," he says. "Some of the older men come around on Sundays to teach the under-fives a few tricks."
So you cater for children in the Rock Hard Café?
"We’re talking teenage charvers with less than five convictions. With a bit of coaching, most turn into career criminals," he says, with pride.
But Barry Greaves is clearly disturbed at the prospect of another Rock Café opening up on his patch.
"I don’t know who these ‘Hard Rock’ blokes are or where they’re from. But if they put so much as a banjo string in Benwell, I’ll have the bastards."