Getdown Services talk balancing seriousness and silliness on debut album 'Crisps' for DIY's Class Of 2025 • Interview • DIY Magazine

It’s not often you find yourself on a chilly winter’s day, watching two fully-grown men try to wrestle themselves into inflatable flamingo outfits, but it’s not often you come across a band like Getdown Services. As bemused passers by (and one very angry dog) in Victoria Park will attest, Josh Law and Ben Sadler are not people who take the accoutrements of burgeoning hype very seriously. Yet though their music – one-liner-laced, spoken word rants hooked over dancefloor-ready beats – their on stage performance (“It’s like Butlins’ Red Coats. Karaoke. Your dad. I dunno…”), and their affably unassuming demeanour might go against everything the algorithm says should equal success, it’s on a steadily upward trajectory that the two Bristolians find themselves heading into 2025. Debut LP ‘Crisps’ has become an underground sleeper favourite. Their winter UK tour was completely sold out. Next year, they’ll support former Class of 2024 graduate Antony Szmierek on the road.

The two frontmen, it seems, are more surprised about their current turn of fate than anyone. “It’s a weird thing to get my head around because I do think we’re good but it also feels like a private joke between me and Ben so it’s weird that anyone really gets it,” muses Josh, now de-flamingoed and nursing a Guinness. “You just have to accept that they do and try your best to invite people in.” However, though Getdown Services might never have expected to get anywhere further than the local venues they cut their teeth in for their first two years as a band, it’s with this spirit of accessibility and fun that the entire project has evolved.

First becoming friends in a Year Nine music class more than a decade ago, when Ben and Josh finally decided to ditch their serious interim bands and reunite, they knew they just wanted it to be a laugh. “We found some people to be quite cold and gate-keepy. Plus, because we were also quite terrible, people didn’t really give a shit,” Ben recalls of their pre-Getdown outfits. “So when it came round that we’d do [a band together] again, we just figured we’d do it on our terms.”

Initially making music without any intention of playing live, when they subsequently were offered a handful of early gigs, they had to figure out what that would look like. “The first gig we did, we had keyboards and Ben was playing bass and we had other instruments; we were trying to sing. And then the second gig was at our mate’s wedding and it was just a karaoke session really,” recalls Josh. “That’s when it put the idea in our head, even though we probably didn’t realise at the time.” “It was like a vessel to allow everyone else [to have fun],” Ben continues. “When someone’s leading the stupidity and being bottom of the pile in terms of humiliating themselves then it allows everyone else to feel at ease. I don’t mind degrading myself; you don’t mind degrading yourself…” “I actively enjoy it!” Josh chuckles. “Well, when I’m with you…”

“When someone’s leading the stupidity, then it allows everyone else to feel at ease.”

— Ben Sadler

Everything for Getdown Services has been a similarly plan-free process of working it out as they go along. With a background as a guitarist (Josh) and drummer (Ben), the band’s distinctive stream-of-consciousness style (sample lyric from ‘Crisps’: “Everyone’s dressed like Doctor fucking Who in here / Why’s he got a bookbag?”) came as a result of neither bandmate having any experience of writing or being a frontman. “We’ve never been writers. It never really interested me before. The spoken word element is because we don’t know what else to do. My girlfriend’s a writer and it seemed like this alien skill to me,” says Josh.

“It feels like with the music, we can get our creative stuff out, and then with the lyrics it’s getting our mental health problems out. They’re completely disjointed; they’re not the same thing,” he continues. “We’re genuinely out of our depth when it comes to vocals so we’re trying to keep it as honest as we can. If you don’t know what you’re doing it’s hard to know if what you’re doing is good, but you do know if you’ve been honest or not. So that’s a good test: I don’t know if it was good but I know it was honest and that’s all I can do.”

It’s this lack of formality or box-ticking that’s perhaps the duo’s best quality. Though there have been no lack of young alternative groups railing at the state of things in recent years, Getdown Services operate somewhere between the surreal observations of Dry Cleaning, the sweary annoyance of Sleaford Mods, and two blokes in a pub putting the world to rights. Some of their songs talk about landlords and gentrification, but they also talk about telly and snacks and poo. “I don’t think anything political in our music is trying to achieve anything beyond vocalising how we feel,” shrugs Josh. “Anything political is political by chance because it comes under the umbrella of things that bother us.”

As the momentum around the band has increased, however, so has an inclination to somewhat level up – albeit in their own way. Though the beauty of a Getdown Services live show is in its chaos, the two friends want it to be chaos of the good kind. “We want to respect the people giving us their time and money so we’re taking it more seriously, whereas before we were a bit more throwaway and didn’t really give a fuck about any of it,” says Josh. “There are people that like what we do, so let’s try and make it good. That’s how much the ambition has grown: let’s try and be a good band.”

They suggest that their new material – the next steps on after both ‘Crisps’ and this winter’s ‘Your Medal’s In The Post’ EP – is taking the band down a route that’s “a bit more personal, maybe less humour”. “But there is a song where Josh shouts a quote from Planet of the Apes…” Ben caveats. “Yeah it does feel a bit ridiculous to say that this new stuff’s all serious and then the first song is us shouting like monkeys, but it’s definitely changed!” his bandmate says.

Yet whether lyrically serious or silly (and given their subsequently-dropped festive single ‘Dr. Christmas’, we’d gauge they haven’t entirely moved over to the former camp), you sense that Getdown Services will always be in it for the right reasons. “People can make their own minds up, but for us it’s just a way to enjoy something we like doing together anyway: taking the piss, making each other laugh, and doing music,” says Ben. “So we’re just doing that, but putting it on a stage.”

#AD