"A real teenage classic, very American rock album. I don’t know much about the band but I loved ‘Blister in the Sun’ and ended up getting the album taped off someone. I was into this at the same time as the Cure stuff and I just used to play it all the time. If I ever hear a song from this album randomly, I can just start joining in with all the lyrics; it’s imprinted on my brain. I remember thinking that a song like ‘Add It Up’ was really sophisticated and kind of had a whole story to it, which definitely influenced my own songwriting. It’s full of great songs, and there’s an incredible song at the end of the album ‘Good Feeling’ that is kind of like a great ballad Lou Reed never wrote."

"This was Roy’s first proper album, although he’d had an earlier, kind of homemade album. … Ghenghis Smith was, in the summer of 1968 after I’d already met Roy and knew a little bit about him by reputation, one of the first vinyl LPs I ever bought. I bought it in the first week I owned a vinyl player, by which time I was 21 years old, living in north London and had just begun with Jethro Tull. It was my summer album of 1968, as it felt like London in the summer - north London in the summer more importantly. It was redolent of the sounds and the images: Hampstead Heath, Highgate Cemetery, the streets, Soho, it was an album that really dovetailed with my own personal experiences of my first summer in London as a young man."

"This was Roy’s first proper album, although he’d had an earlier, kind of homemade album. … Ghenghis Smith was, in the summer of 1968 after I’d already met Roy and knew a little bit about him by reputation, one of the first vinyl LPs I ever bought. I bought it in the first week I owned a vinyl player, by which time I was 21 years old, living in north London and had just begun with Jethro Tull. It was my summer album of 1968, as it felt like London in the summer - north London in the summer more importantly. It was redolent of the sounds and the images: Hampstead Heath, Highgate Cemetery, the streets, Soho, it was an album that really dovetailed with my own personal experiences of my first summer in London as a young man."