Back in Liverpool in 1953 after university, Roger McGough was well placed to see the link between the kind of humorous poetry that the Hull student newspaper had liked and the more strident and incisive work of Christopher Logue, whose writing had so impressed him compared with the more intellectual poetry he had met both at school and again in the literary circles of the university and its magazine. Logue had produced his poems as posters, for instance, and written for Private Eye. When McGough was a student in Hull, trying to get his work published, Philip Larkin wrote in reply to some work that McGough had sent to him, and gave an encouraging response to some poems; this clearly had an impact, as McGough has commented in interviews. There was no lack of self-belief, when, in 1958, he also discovered the Beats and particularly Jack Kerouac.

Not much has been written about the influences behind McGough's writing, which he took up between the end of the 1950s and 1962, when his group Scaffold was formed. The popular assumption, reinforced by McGough's image on stage and television, is that he was a ‘sixties poet’, and the cover photographs on his early volumes suggest that he was ‘a style guru’, as he has playfully remarked. On the cover of Gig (1973), a collection reflecting life on the road and the poetry circuit, he wears a dark hat, a beard and a necktie, a bohemian image which reflected the fashion of the period. But before this, he had been learning his craft from a wide range of literary sources, and one of the distinguishing features of the poetry of The Mersey Sound volume of 1967 is that many of the stylistic effects are non-literary. Jack Kerouac and the American Beats, well before the 1960s, had portrayed a sense of awe and admiration in the sheer flow of spontaneous writing that led to On The Road – after a good editor had been to work on it, of course. McGough refers specifically to the notion of seeing that poetry could be accessible, and that form may be secondary to rhythms and structures from an emotional centre and a poetic discourse of directness.