I’m sure we’ve all wondered what it must be like to have spent time in a world-class group, only for the member in question to be fatefully ousted or take the momentous decision to absent him- or herself from said outfit ahead of their achieving global fame and fortune. The Pete Best Syndrome is a matter of record. But what about those lesser­ known Bests? Anthony Phillips and Richard Macphail may not have, to my knowledge, had their sagas committed to celluloid, but as our cover story affirms this month, their role in the development of Genesis was considerable. Writer Nick Hasted speaks to them both, and to Tony Banks and Steve Hackett, as he explores the early years of a band whose tale most certainly didn’t begin with Foxtrot.
Another of our writers, David Pearson, speaks to some female artists who, unlike the mononymous Cilia, Sandie, Dusty and Lulu, weren’t able to sustain long, successful pop careers, in what amounts to an alternate history of 60s Brit Girls. At the complete opposite musical extreme there are Deutsch Amerikan is che Freundschaft, aka DAF, a hardcore electronic duo from Dusseldorf whose furiously intense dance music, as RC’s intrepid Simon Spence reports, exerted an influence almost as seismic as Kraft werk’s.
Elsewhere this issue, Rob Hughes interviews Mark Lanegan and discovers a musician who has found prolific succour in the pandemic. Jack Watkins captures Isaac Hayes at a critical point in his career as Shaft mania grips R&B. And Bob Stanley manages to separate the art from the artist in his appreciation of the monomaniacal productions of Phil Spector. In the Reviews pages there are lengthy considerations of albums by Black Sabbath, Dusty Springfield and Teenage Fanclub, while towards the back of the magazine we give space to the harmony pop of Free Design and the pioneering soul arrangements of Charles Stepney, to movie soundtracks and the music choices of Steven Wilson’s Blackfield ally, Aviv Geffen.

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