The advent of large 8-10m telescopes heralds a new age in stellar astronomy. It is now possible to carry out detailed spectroscopic observations at high resolution of the brightest stars of galaxies in the Local Group, and it is envisaged that intermediate resolution observations will be extended to stars in the nearest galaxy clusters such as Virgo and Fornax. For some years the authors have been carrying out the groundwork involved in identifying young massive supergiant stars in nearby resolved galaxies, with a view to performing follow-up detailed studies of selected samples. In this article we summarize the contribution that the William Herschel Telescope has made to this project, and further, show that even a 4.2m telescope with a blue sensitive, large format CCD at a good site with dependable sub-arcsecond seeing can make an important contribution to the detailed study of our nearest spiral neighbours M31 and M33.