First of all, I hope you all appreciate the amount of research I had to do for this post. My poor innocent soul will never be the same again.
During the Bum-chicka-wow-wow heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, there were several porn cinemas in Glasgow.
The one I am most familiar with – because my bus to work passed it every day, you dirty-minded lot – was the Classic Grand. The building started life as a warehouse for the Clyde before becoming a picture house (of the regular variety). In the 1950s it billed itself as an ‘Art’ cinema: in reality, it showed porn and extreme horror. This closed in the 60s before being resurrected as the Classic Grand in 1973. By the time it closed in the early 90s, it was known as the Curzon. I have heard that if you were to try to phone the cinema, the calls were redirected to the Cannon (it’s parent company) in Sauchiehall Street as the Classic’s staff – three old ladies and a janitor – were always too busy selling tissues and cleaning up (?!) to answer the phone.
The Tatler in Sauchiehall Street first was a cinema called The Vitagraph in 1912. It was a long, narrow building with the auditorium only 8 seats wide. After various re-incarnations it became the Tatler Cinema Club in 1973 and showed unrated porn. In 1981 it became the Curzon and specialised in Scandanavian soft porn before closing in 1984. In 2004 Historic Scotland endowed Grade B Listed Building status on the cinema, now a bar and nightclub.
In 1994 Divally’s opened in Maxwell Street and still showed erotica until 2002, after becoming a lap dancing club.
I shudder to think at the traffic this blog post will get but, dear reader, I do it for you.
BUM-CHICK-A-WOW-WOW!
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