Ray Roughler-Jones

By Pendle Harte on June 10th 2010

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Ray Roughler-Jones knows everybody. “I’ve spent most of my life in pubs.” Mostly in Portobello Road’s old Warwick Castle, which, before its clean-up a few years ago, was a proper old dirty boozer. Ray and his buddies held court there throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drinking their messy way around the area. Since then, Ray’s been to California and Swansea and now, back in W10, he’s launching a book charting his misadventures on the Portobello. But it’s not just any old drunken rambling because Ray’s cast of characters includes Keith and Kevin Allen, Joe Strummer, Wendy James, Shane McGowan, Anna Chancellor and Neneh Cherry, all of whom lost afternoons and nights in the Warwick with Ray over the years.

Out of all this came a magazine, The Roughler, which Ray put together in an amateurish way with a definite talent for it: over the course of just a few issues it featured many of the above stars on its covers and ran (some real, others made up) scoops on Joe Strummer and other local names. It started as a pubzine, initially devised to carry news of the Warwick’s cricket team, the Old Roughians (formed at Rough Trade records), plus a bit of pool and other information from the pub’s notice board. Then they started taking photographs in the pub and sometimes there was somebody famous, so it started being newsworthy. Ray put it together by cutting and sticking at the Ravenscourt Park Community Resource, inspired by his friend Ian Bone’s work on his new title, Class War. But in addition to cricket scores, despite Ray claiming “I was absolutely useless at doing it”, The Roughler had a knack for pinpointing the zeitgeist – splashing Wendy James on the cover just before she made it big with Transvision Vamp, and Neneh Cherry “before she cracked it”, plus Shane MacGowan and Joe Strummer.

Cut to 2010 and Ray, who stopped drinking in 2000 but still tells a good yarn in his heavy Welsh ramble, takes a job as a night watchman in a warehouse in east London that is being used for fashion shoots. “There is lots of food, because obviously models don’t eat, and a computer, so I sit down to write and over three nights I write 40,000 words.” And that was the book – and he claims it’s entirely unedited, because that’s how the publisher wanted it. When we meet, he’s expecting Lulu Guinness, Rhys Ifans and Anna Chancellor to come to his launch at the Tabernacle next week, and he was featured in The Idler last week.

The luvvie connections come presumably from the notorious Portobello Panto, which Ray started. “I started it, never mind those other girls,” he says, referring to the in-fighting that became known as the Panto Wars. “The first one was at the Cobden Club and it was Cinderella. Can’t remember when that was and I don’t want to get it wrong because people pick you up on panto.” The wars broke out, predictably, over the drink. “It was when the pros said no drinking at rehearsals. They got the hump because the ams weren’t taking it seriously enough, though it was us who got all the laughs. It got so popular that people were conscious of who was in the audience, I mean I never saw him but I’m sure that Richard Curtis was there and they all wanted to advance their careers which I suppose is what you do if you’re an actor.” From having the lead part in Sleeping Beauty, Ray was gradually demoted and last year he wasn’t called at all. “I’ve got a picture of me on my pretend horse as Prince Charming and there’s Alfie Allen as a child sitting on someone’s shoulders and now he’s the lead and they don’t call me.”

Ray’s story starts in Swansea (“Dylan Thomas called Swansea the graveyard of ambition,” he likes to quote) and is full of tales like this: “I moved from Swansea to Ladbroke Grove with my milliner girlfriend and meanwhile I’m selling speed. The phone rings one morning and I’m thinking it’s one of my customers but it’s Lady Di wanting to buy a hat.” And this: “I was buying a flat and needed £500 for the survey, and this was the 80s and nobody had any money. Joe Strummer said ‘meet me tomorrow’ and when I got there he asked for my real name and wrote me a cheque for £500. I said thanks mate, I’ll pay you back and he said ‘don’t worry, that’s on The Clash’.” He’s hoping that the book will catapult him into “doing a Howard Marks thing – turning up and getting paid to talk” – and with stories like this, it’s pretty likely to happen.

Drowning on Dry Land by Ray Roughler-Jones is published by Tangent Books and available at local outlets including Rough Trade and The Dispensary as well as online at tangentbooks.co.uk 

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