Getdown Services: ‘The world isn’t in a good place, so let’s have a fucking laugh’

It’s a glorious Tuesday evening in June and over at London’s storied Southbank Centre, Harry Styles has roped in the Jules Buckley Orchestra for a grandiose reimagining of his hits that Rolling Stone UK will later laud as the greatest moment of his solo career so far. 

But life is about contrasts. A stone’s throw away in the same establishment’s smaller Purcell Room, something altogether different but equally unforgettable is taking place at the same time. Two topless blokes in their early thirties are delivering electro-rock bangers about the harsh realities of modern life, while encouraging detractors of a recent performance on Later… with Jools Holland  to “suck farts from my fucking arse.” They are Getdown Services, aka childhood mates Ben Sadler and Josh Law, and their frenetic live shows have seen them gather enough fans to sell out two dates at London’s Roundhouse later this year and two homecomings in Bristol.  

Their act couldn’t be more different from that of Styles, but it speaks volumes about these word-of-mouth sensations that the pop giant himself proved to be an unlikely fan when he handpicked them to play the Southbank Centre’s Meltdown Festival he curated this summer. 

During an hour-long show on this particular night in London, they will drolly quip that Styles has “deeply concerning mental health” in selecting them for his festival, before teasing the Southbank crowd with a cheese board and then refusing to give it to them. But such an elaborate gimmick can only get a band so far. It helps that their music, which often sees state-of-the-nation satire being paired against knotty guitars (see breakout hit ‘Dog Dribble’),  is genuinely brilliant. You are likely to leave their shows with the feeling that Sadler and Law might just be one of Britain’s very best live bands. 

“At the start, we were just firing on instinct and thinking ‘This feels good; this is funny,’” reflects Law several weeks later, nursing a well-deserved pint of Coke after posing for Rolling Stone UK next to Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave. 

“But we weren’t a good live band; we were just really aggressive and drunk a lot of the time. We got a name for ourselves for being, well, not louty, but Josh got into a big habit of throwing ice at people, and there was just a lot of shouting and being quite aggressive to people as a form of self-therapy,” he reflects. “And it’s cheaper, innit?  

“But the moment people started showing up to see us and had bought tickets, we knew we owed it to them to try and make something out of it.”

“I’ve seen so many bands where it’s like watching someone do a Rubik’s cube. It’s impressive, but it’s boring, innit?”

Josh Law

The band can be traced back to Sadler and Law’s friendship as school mates growing up in Minehead, a seaside resort town in the south-west which is arguably best known for its Butlins. The pair say they formed Getdown Services as a way of escaping the humdrum of everyday life and lobbing a few ice cubes along the way. But as proud champions of the town too, the pair realised there was a chance to fly the flag for the old-school variety entertainment offered by that very resort. 

“There’s a lot of parallels drawn between us and Butlins,” reflects Law. “But that level of entertainment has no less inherent value than seeing an orchestra. We’re just trying to use the infrastructure around live music to try and shoehorn old-school entertainment in for people who might think they’re above it. And when you’ve got a load of self-identified musos doing that, it’s the stuff like that [which] makes us feel good. We just realised that being silly and acting like a kid makes us feel really good, and then we started going, ‘Actually, maybe this is quite good for everyone else.’”  

Law later adds: “We’re really into music, but that’s not the point we’re trying to prove. I’ve seen so many bands where it’s like watching someone do a Rubik’s cube. It’s impressive, but it’s boring, innit? It’s not really very interesting to see someone play an instrument unless it’s something insanely creative. Seeing five people on stage staring [down] on guitar pedals isn’t something I find very interesting.” 

There’s also the simple joy, Sadler reckons, of the infectious escapism offered by seeing two topless blokes having the time of their life during what is, to put it mildly, a tough time for the world. 

“Things are so fucking dark at the moment,” he reasons. “Elon Musk has just become a trillionaire, and we’ve had monsoon weather over the last couple of days. The world is not in a good place and it’s only gonna get worse. So if people are spending a lot of money to come and see us, let’s just fucking have a laugh. There’s old-school tricks, there’s oggie oggie oggie and it’s just great stuff.” 

All the forward momentum of the last few years now points in the direction of their second album Massive Champion, which arrives in August. Their first record employed a thrilling blend of disco and T-Rex-adjacent classic rock to dissect the drudgery and dissatisfaction of their everyday lives. For Law, their second record reckons with the concept of achieving your dreams in a relative sense and realising they might not be the solution to your problems. 

“We thought being stuck in work with no money was the thing making us miserable,” explains Law. “But we’ve found a bit of success with this band and it’s a pretty dreamy situation to be in, but you’re still left with a lot of these same feelings.” 

This is brilliantly realised on the laid-back stand-out ‘Cha Cha Slide’, which sees Law reflect on his anxieties around a childhood disco with what he describes as a “lifelong feeling of unease”. There is also a line about the time his mum mistakenly told him a helicopter had crashed into Big Ben on 9/11. 

“That did happen, but I wanted that line to show how naive I was at the time and how I feel like people don’t really change,” he admits. “That inner child, because most of us don’t grow up and start naming the things we’re feeling. The only thing that changes, I think, is that you have an understanding of what it is. But that doesn’t mean you have a handle on it.”  

Elsewhere, ‘The Radiator’ – a dance-punk banger which sees the pair namecheck the Dyson Airblade, among other things – feels like an almighty triumph and the sound of a band being fully liberated. 

“I definitely had a chip on my shoulder for most of my twenties and when we were writing the first album,” concedes Law. “A lot of stuff had gone on in my family life, but you can’t maintain that anger. It was too tiring and I couldn’t be bothered to be angry all the time. You can rant and be wound up, but you’re just neglecting the people that are around you and things that are good. The band has allowed us to take a step back and decide how we want to do things, but I think it would’ve happened anyway. You get older and you just want to have a nice time.”  

“I think if this had all happened when we were younger, it would have just ended badly,” adds Sadler. “We would’ve just fallen into bad habits; I would’ve got really anxious and I would have gotten too overconfident with it. We would have ended up in a situation where we’d do things to try and cope with it that would have ultimately destroyed us, I think.”  

But even if they’ve got a steady hold on their burgeoning fame, there’s still the small matter of dealing with some overfamiliar admirers among their ever-growing fanbase. 

“A picture of Ben queuing up for the toilet at Green Man did make its way online,” admits Law. 

“I looked fucking mental,” says Sadler. “I was in a John Smith’s crop top, shorts and my partner’s fluffy pink slippers. I’d just woken up needing a shit and that photo appeared on Instagram. I mean, come on. That was a bit weird for us.” 

Weird, perhaps, but also a sign that they’re getting noticed in all the right places, and in all four corners of the globe.  

“We played a gig in Brisbane earlier this year, and there was a pensioner at the front of the crowd and they were headbanging,” says Law. “I don’t really care what route we’ve got to [take] in order for people to do that, or whatever tactics we take to get people to get their guard down. To just see people with their eyes closed, losing their fucking minds, is quite a profound thing.”

Taken from the August/September issue of Rolling Stone UK, out now. Order your copy here.