GETDOWN SERVICES

If you’ve been to a gig in the Southwest of England in the last couple years, chances are you’ve seen Getdown Services warming the crowd into fanatic explosion.

Having been introduced to the scene as a kind of novelty – two blokes in their late-20s with their shirts off, ranting about the Naked Chef’s 15-minute dinners – the pair, childhood friends Josh Law and Ben Sadler, quickly established a close-to-cult following for their sprechgesang approach to disco.

Laddish and shockingly funny, the pair sit down with me after a bruising photoshoot inside the boxing ring. I ask them if they’ve ever fought before, and Ben nods sheepishly. Once, at school. “It wasn’t an accident, but it was a mistake.”

But Getdown Services as we know them now first materialised when a friend’s wedding band dropped out at the last minute, and the boys stepped in. From there, they started playing gigs for real, and the offers just kept coming in. Ben says that “during the first year, it was largely just a piss-up. We’d just get hammered.” I mention seeing them play the afterparty for Bristol’s DotToDot festival – an event where they sang ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by The Human League using only the lyrics ‘you were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar’ – and the pair cringe. Josh tells me that that was the last time they performed drunk. Ben nods. “I was spannered.”

The pair were fast friends: having met in year six, they were making music together by 13. The band – aptly and adolescently named ‘Access Flap’ – mostly did covers; ‘Fire’ by Kasabian, ‘Jenny Don’t Be Hasty’ by Paolo Nutini. Josh tells me about their frontman at the time. “He had a Dolce & Gabbana belt that he’d gotten on holiday with a spinning buckle, and in the choruses he would spin it. You know, “I’m on fiiiiiire!”

The pair aren’t ignorant to the novelty element of Getdown Services; the boxing shoot itself is not too far from how they appear onstage. “Sometimes I think about all the bands in the crowd that night watching us, thinking, ‘How the fuck have they done it? We’re really hard and we play instruments.’” But that laissez-faire aspect is integral to the band. “It’d be no good if we stood up there saying, like, Josh spent eight hours a day making this. Please show it some respect.”

It’s not all canned beer and canned laughter, though. I ask them if they consider themselves to be a political band, and they think the question over in a way that suggests this isn’t the first time they’ve had this discussion. ‘When you’re trying to write what you know, and you’re trying to be as honest as possible – we didn’t come out to complain about the state of housing or gentrification – you talk about what plays on your mind, affects your mood. Of course it’s going to come out.’ Josh adds that it’s not a deliberately conscious thing. It’s the frank dialogue they have with one another, so of course it feeds through. Then: ‘yeah. We’re somewhere between IDLES and Rage Against the Machine.’ There’s a real sense of humour in their writing. I mention a tweet of theirs (‘Tip of the day: Small independent businesses tend to have less security so they’re easier to shoplift from. #RobLocal’) and the pair grin. ‘If it’s good enough for me to put it on Twitter, it’s probably good enough to put it in a song.’

They have a complicated history with politics, though. ‘We’ve got a fucking following from the Proud Boys,’ they tell me. ‘Gavin McInnes spoke about us on his podcast – “there’s this great British band” – and we were like, this is not good. What the fuck is he doing playing our music?’

It’s difficult to imagine what part of Getdown’s ethos resonates with McInnes; a little of his younger days’ punk sensibility, perhaps, or a misunderstanding of the kind of Britishness the pair represent. McInnes, once the founder of VICE, is now a spokesperson for the American far right and founded the extremist, neo-fascist group the Proud Boys, which he stepped down from in 2018.

I ask them, then, whether they consider themselves to be a particularly British band. Their debut album, Crisps, is awash with titbits and fourth wall breaks that seem almost agonisingly British: full buses on rainy days, Steve Backshall’s Deadly 60, the cost-of-living crisis. But it’s not those things the pair think gives Crisps its stiff upper lip; Josh tells me it was through trying to make each other laugh that many of the lyrics were written. ‘It wasn’t like, ‘I want to write an album about modern life in Britain,’ but our sense of humour was guiding a lot of what we wrote about, and I think our sense of humour is very British. The Britishness gets stamped on when we start speaking.’

They tell me, too, that while they think some of the best bands in the world are British – they recently toured with Libertine Pete Doherty - that their influences are distinctly American; disco, rock ‘n’ roll, hip hop. Ben adds that part of the sense of this Britishness, too, is because they’ve always played to their strengths and not strayed far from what they’re comfortable with (which might seem unusual, considering the shirtless karaoke-esque performances.) He says, ‘we don’t have to pretend like we can sing 'cos we fucking can’t. With that approach, it’s always going to be quite British.’ Their characterisation of their homeland is honest; clear-eyed, caricatured, but familiarly fond.

One of these strengths, it seems, is in their ability to pick anecdotes, memories, off-the-cuff one-liners from the ground and twist them into genius. Some of Negativland’s favourite Getdown-isms were ‘the chronicles of fucking hernia’ and ‘you're somewhere in between a childhood dream and a pyramid scheme.’ Ben tells me that ‘the funniest things, and the things that resonate, are what you overhear. In conversation, chatting to your mates, it’s not something that’s been thought about. Those are the bits that matter most.’ Their performances, too, are picked straight from real life. Josh tells me that they’re ‘performers in our personalities anyway, so we can get it out there. It’s not really a show – which is a bit of an embarrassing thing to say, really.’

It's this ability to translate the everyday – the really, truly mundane – into something not just exciting but escapist that is emblematic of Getdown’s genius. The band might have caught Bristol's eye by playing second fiddle to bigger bands, but by now they’re a spectacle entirely of their own making.

Words: Kate Jeffrie

Photos: Kirkland Childs & Isaac Stubbings

Full article and more images in NEGATIVLAND - ISSUE ONE