Some clubs are remembered for their music; Cleopatra’s is remembered for its nickname, its queues and the sheer number of Glaswegians who met their other half on its dancefloor. Officially it was Cleopatra’s, on Great Western Road; to every single person who ever went, and most who didn’t, it was ‘Clatty Pat’s’ — and the affection in that name, half mockery and half devotion, tells you everything about its place in the city’s memory. It is the most fondly groaned-about lost club in Glasgow, and this site’s Nightclubs chapter would be incomplete without it.
The Nickname
The nickname is the whole story, and it follows a deep Glasgow instinct this site has noted before: the city keeps what it loves by giving it a by-name. ‘Clatty’ — Glaswegian for dirty, grubby, none too clean — was not an insult so much as a knowing wink; everyone understood exactly what kind of establishment Clatty Pat’s was, and queued round the block for it anyway, week after week, for years. The pet name was a badge, not a warning.
The Meat Market
What Clatty Pat’s was, gloriously and unashamedly, was a meat market — an end-of-the-night institution where the city went to couple up, its reputation as the place Glaswegians met their future husbands and wives entirely earned and endlessly repeated. Ask around any gathering of a certain age in the West of Scotland and someone will admit, with a groan and a grin, that their parents — or they themselves — got together at Clatty Pat’s. It was less a nightclub than a civic matchmaking service with a late licence.
It sat in the great tradition of Glasgow’s big commercial clubs — the places the whole city actually went, as opposed to the connoisseurs’ rooms of the Sub Club or the Arches on this site’s pages — and it belonged to the same 1980s and 1990s world of pet-named nightspots as ‘Sticky Vicky’s’ (Victoria’s), where illusion and reality cheerfully diverged and nobody minded a bit. These were not cool clubs; they were beloved ones, which is a different and more durable thing.
The Afterlife
Its cultural afterlife proves the point. Long after it closed, Clatty Pat’s remained such a fixture of collective memory that it inspired a stage play built entirely around Glaswegians’ recollections of the place — a nightclub so woven into the city’s social history that it became, of all things, theatre. Few venues of any kind get that; a ‘clatty’ West End disco managing it says everything about the peculiar depth of Glasgow’s affection for its own unglamorous past.
The building and the era have gone the way of so much in this site’s pages, but the name never will — ‘Clatty Pat’s’ is permanent Glasgow vocabulary, a shorthand for a whole vanished mode of night out, invoked with helpless fondness by people who swear they hated it. That contradiction — the club everyone mocks and nobody forgets — is precisely its monument.
Cleopatra’s earns its page not for musical importance, which it never claimed, but for something rarer: a place in the actual life story of the city, the room where a remarkable share of Glasgow literally began its families. From the coolest basements in world techno to a ‘clatty’ disco on Great Western Road, this site’s nightlife chapter holds them all — and none is remembered with a more Glaswegian mixture of embarrassment and love than Clatty Pat’s.