The Roebuck

The Roebuck was situated on the corner of Beaufort Street where Beaufort Market was and the Kings Road. It was also virtually next to another famous punk pub the Man In The Moon. Everyone popped in there from Led Zeppelin to Thin Lizzy to gangster John Bindon and Reginald Bosanquet who used to present News At 10 (and used to pop into SEX to buy rubber underwear). Seedy and with an undercurrent of criminality.

Just around the corner was Worlds End and it was in The Roebuck that Malcom McLaren asked Johnny Rotten to be singer in the band Sex Pistols.

As such it was an ideal watering hole for the hordes of punks invading the Kings Road. The landlord was quick to spot this.

Nigel Brickell (Smutz -Beaufort Market) I from the early days of the Roebuck (pub on the Kings Road) knew the landlord Jack Hayes aka fat jack. The downstairs bar at weekends was usually full of 60s rockers, Zeppelin, the Who etc and whizz kid ad men like John ‘Kings Road Cowboy’ Cigarini. John became a great and still is friend, he knew everybody who was anybody from the music and film business. 

Fat Jack knew my crowd of punks, some underage and took me aside one day and said I have a empty function room upstairs, can you get your punk crowd up there? He did not realise that he had let the genie out of the bottle! It was not long before it (the Roebuck pub) was wall to wall with young attractive punk girls and us dudes. … It was sex, drugs and rock and roll heaven!! London Leatherman

Colin McKinney I was employed part time at the Roebuck in 1976-1977, this was during the height of the Punk scene, many of the punk bands would be customers including Sex Pistols and Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. It was always busy especially on the last Saturday of the month when the classic cars used to cruise up and down the Kings Road. Closed Pubs

Paul Du Noyer 1976 had a longer, hotter summer than anyone could remember. If you sought respite from the sun, there was no shadier place in the whole King’s Road than the Roebuck pub. Truant schoolgirls mingled with drug dealers in the place where McLaren had introduced his new discovery, Johnny Rotten, to the other three Sex Pistols. Andrew, a local teenager at the time, looks back: “You’d get Phil Lynott, Johnny Lydon [aka Rotten] and Sid Vicious upstairs in the Roebuck’s pool room. They’d sit in the corner not drawing attention to themselves, looking wary. Lydon was very shy and Sid was really f—ed up. They would be studiously ignored, because it was uncool to recognise them. It was incredibly druggy upstairs. You could even buy smack over the counter, along with a pint of Guinness.”

Another Chelsea resident recalls walking past the Roebuck just as the police arrived: “Out of the windows there came this enormous cascade of drugs, hurriedly thrown into the street. Andrew remembers it well: ”The raids were hysterical, 40 or 50 policemen from Chelsea nick descending on the pub and lining people up. The place was run by this huge bloke, called Fat Jack, with one eye and a bald head. The funny thing is that, years later, the Roebuck became a Dome Cafe. Inside, you’d see all the same people who used to do drugs in the pub, but now they weren’t on drugs any more.” Guardian, On Kings Road Summer, 17.8.1996

Apparently violence put an end to the punks welcome there.

Ricky Lorrio (Innocent Bystanders) By now I was spending every weekend down the Roebuck on the Kings Road. The upstairs of the pub had two/three pool tables, a small bar and a juke-box. Bands didn’t play there, and the downstairs was for the old locals. But at the time, every punk in London went there. It was the Groucho club for punks and Rock-a-Billie’s, Skinheads, Road Rat Bikers, speed-freaks, mad-misfits. It was like a Mad Max bar. You went to the Roebuck on a Saturday night, got your three “blues” for a quid, drink snake-bite with blackcurrant, and after closing time, find a party to gate-crash, and now and then, got into a punch-up with the “straights” in the street.

The whole Teddy boy vs Punk thing was dead by 78, but for some reason or another, we were always having street fights over nothing. One night at the Roebuck, there was a BIG fight, between a big Skinhead and a big Teddy-Boy Called Tiny. I was there and I saw the fight. It was like a John Wayne western bar brawl. Well, after that all the Punks and misfits were barred from the Roebuck, and we lost our HQ. Innocent Bystanders, Bored Teenagers

Subie Barnes (Muvvers Pride) The Kings Road was like a second home; we were always in the Roebuck and have great memories of that pub. We once got chased into it by a load of Skinheads and I remember hiding under one of the pool tables.

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