They discussed their musical ambitions after a conversation about Reading Festival, Falkous gave Harding a tape of songs he had written on his own, and shortly after they formed a band called Best after early Beatles drummer Pete Best.

Best existed in this form for almost a year before Bevan left to concentrate on his acting career, but not before Best had played a show with a band called 'Myrtle', which featured the bass guitarist Jon Chapple.

[citation needed] A compilation of the band's singles, Mcluskyism, came out in February 2006; a limited-edition version came with two additional CDs of B-sides (labelled as B-sides and C-sides), rarities and live recordings from their final headline performance at the University of London Union (The band would make one further live appearance on 01/12/04 supporting Shellac at the Scala in London).

Almost immediately, rumours began to swell that the pair were collaborating with some members of also-defunct Cardiff noise-core act Jarcrew (the project, which received no official title for eighteen months, was jokingly referred to as "Jarclusky") – however, the full extent of the collaboration was not known until Falkous created an unassuming MySpace page for the group under the name Future of the Left, complete with unpolished recordings of the band's first songs.

The outfit have since incorporated members of now-defunct British punk rock act Million Dead, and have (after several years of resistance from Falkous) started including Mclusky tracks in their live sets.

In 2014, Falkous announced a benefit gig to help save venue Le Pub in Newport, with a lineup consisting of Jarcrew and a set of mclusky songs played by Falkous and Jack Egglestone, joined by future of the left bassist Julia Ruzicka and Damien Sayell, vocalist of Bristol band The St. Pierre Snake Invasion.

This lineup has been referred to by Falco as 'mclusky' (with inverted commas) and announced a second concert at Clwb Ifor Bach upon the quick sale of all tickets for the Newport event.

Then known as Mclusky* (the asterisk in reference to missing members), the band reformed to play The Garage in London on 3 December 2015 to raise money for cancer research[2] with Rat the Magnificent (featuring Ian Catskilkin of Art Brut).