Smith said that he was 15 when he first heard Alex Harvey, and that the Sensational Alex Harvey Band was the first and only group he ever really followed. He said, "was probably my only real idol. I travelled around the country to see them. [... People talk about Iggy Pop as the original punk but certainly in Britain the forerunner of the punk movement was Alex Harvey. [...] I remembered the power of that live performance and I've tried to have that in my mind since I started up my own group." He soon became influenced by the emergence of the UK punk scene of 1977 and has cited the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers, Elvis Costello and the Buzzcocks as important influences on his own music from this period. He described the release of "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols as "the last time something major happened to me and changed me [...] it was the best summer of my life. I remember listening to 'Anarchy' for the very first time at a party and thinking, 'This is it!' You knew straight away, you either loved it or hated it, and it polarised an entire nation for that summer." Elsewhere, Smith said that the Stranglers were his favourite punk band and that Costello "was a cut above the whole lot of them" in terms of lyrics and song crafting.