A LEGENDARY Glasgow pub has made its first appearance on a vinyl record sleeve.
The Laurieston on Bridge Street has pride of place on the front of Album Club's first LP - a creation forged by members of a record club throughout the first 2020 lockdown.
The club began when musician Michael John McCarthy - also known as MJ - got a group of his friends together to meet once a month to discuss one album - along the same lines as a book club.
MJ said: "I invited a bunch of my friends to get together in April 2019 to discuss albums. They didn't all know each other, so the unifying thing was we all loved music.
"I work with music so I really just wanted to talk about it for the love of it.
"The first record was Green by REM.
"Before our meeting, I went over to the shop across from the Laurieston and bought a pack of cards so if we ran out of things to talk about, I could teach them a card trick.
"I haven't even taken the plastic off of them."
Next month, Album Club will meet in person again, in the Laurieston, for the first time since 2020 and in that time, the group managed to create an entire album remotely.
MJ added: "We moved album club online over to zoom and I suddenly found I had a lot of time on my hands so I started recording the songs.
"Rhona NicDhughail started recording vocals, Cathy Forde wrote lyrics.
"This was all across April, May and June 2020.
"All of a sudden we had an album that we had all contributed to."
Album Club sent their recordings to the record company Last Night from Glasgow and it has now been released.
MJ added: "It's great to have something physical to hold in your hands. We've been getting messages from people on facebook so it's great to see people are enjoying it.
"We could never have imagined back in 2020 we would have something like this.
"A lot of people want to buy it just for the front cover.
MJ said that the LP now takes pride of place on the gantry of The Laurieston which he said holds a very special place in his heart. He added: "It reminds me of my favourite pubs in Ireland. The hospitality is incredible. I've been going for 10 years now. They do the best pint of Guinness in Glasgow.
"It's a great community of people and it's probably the friendliest bar in the city."
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