Getdown Services

As they sell out tours and command audiences worldwide, it's a strange ask to imagine Getdown Services as underdogs. Yet, for several years, they were there for the hell of the grind, committed to playing any and every show they could get, from sparse opening slots in Bristol to out of town dives. Chat to them long enough and they’ll often reminisce about their very first gig overseas, performing in a leaky barn to a French crowd of two in the commune of La Zad. ‘One was a man sitting facing away from the stage smoking a bong, and the other was literally a dog’.

For most bands, this might be a lowpoint. However, as the duo recall, it was anything but: ‘We knew if we could enjoy playing that gig, then we’d enjoy any gig’. It’s this irrepressible, anarchic joy that has endeared them to audiences everywhere they’ve travelled, and has once again been effortlessly captured on their new record ‘Massive Champion’. At heart, it’s an ode to their childhood, and the British cultural artefacts that defined it, from the Beano to retro video games and sosmix. But it’s also a distillation of their live wire performances, its thirteen tracks overflowing with the same boundless energy and seditious wit that sees them command each stage they set foot on.

Their journey towards this record is one of those rare success stories that often feel consigned to rock and roll history. Having met as kids in Minehead, Josh Law and Ben Sadler began making music together as soon as they could get hold of instruments, beginning and breaking up projects on and off for the next twenty years. Getdown Services started as another of these diversions, conceived during lockdown whilst Law was sitting around bored and making beats at home. However, once the world opened up, they launched the band in earnest and quickly made a name for themselves in Bristol with their schoolboy antics and subversive humour. ‘We were just trying to make each other laugh the whole time’ says Law. ‘Even now we’re still just those 12 year old boys egging each other on’. Amongst a flurry of chaotic shows, early demos soon took shape as real songs, and the duo promptly released their debut album ‘Crisps’ in November 2023. A portentous, breakneck mix of apocalyptic disco, new wave and proto-punk, it swiftly became a word of mouth sensation, and those sparse rooms soon turned into sellout headline tours, prominent festival slots and a very dedicated fan group, the titular ‘Crabbers’. For the duo, travelling the world was an odd blessing, and a slightly overwhelming one. As Sadler notes: “We often wonder why people have a connection to the music when many of the references are so weird, specific and nonsensical.” But, even without footnotes, the charms of their debut proved to be more than enduring. Two more EP’s ‘Your Medal’s In The Post’ and ‘Primordial Slot Machine’ soon landed in the following years, alongside another two collections of B-sides, demos, and outtakes (the affectionately named ‘Crumbs’ and ‘Crumbs 2’), all of which only propelled the band further into their newfound fame.

Despite this prolific output, it was only at the beginning of 2026 the pair found the time to begin work on ‘Massive Champion’. Drawing on nearly a hundred demos pulled together in this brief gap between tours, it saw them dig deep into the ups and downs of the past few years, and the complex feelings around their newfound success. What emerged was not a straightforward stare down the mirror, but instead a more circuitous examination of their upbringing and its overreaching effects on their present lives. “An important aim for us on this record was pushing our boundaries lyrically, aiming for a bit more storytelling and emotion” Law says, and this attention to the minutiae of one’s salad days, the weight of one’s early history, lends a new maturity to their songwriting. Whereas ‘Crisps’ often revelled in its bitterness and antipathy, an unsteady, almost sweet, nostalgia now balances out the sharper edges. Occasionally on ‘Massive Champion’, these themes are front and centre. Album highlight ‘Cha Cha Slide’ sees Law riff on the listeners expectations, turning the core of the iconic track into an introspective look at childhood anxieties and their lingering shapes. He notes of it “In many ways we never really grow up. The emotions you feel as a child are the same emotions you have as an adult, you just lack the language to express them properly.” However, more often than not, these subjects are buried beneath layers of irreverence, as the pair in-joke and allude to the long-lost characters and eccentrics of their youth, all the while ad-libbing their various intrusive thoughts. Law jokes that ‘there’s also a lot of lyrics that twist on the fictional arguments we all tend to have with people in your head’, a motif that even extends to the album’s tongue-in-cheek title and cover, an incarnation of one’s childlike delusions of staggering power.

Although presented with levity, these themes repeatedly dwell on more weighty matters. ‘I wonder if I’ll ever stop thinking about killing baby Oleg, I hope not, ' Sadler sings on ‘I Can’t Die Like That’, an anthemic call-to-arms filled with wisecracks about death and viscera, with nary a hint of melodrama. It’s a preoccupation that returns on the Prince-esque ‘Stop Living’, its sugary production balanced on a fine edge against its lyrical morbidity - “still on the payroll, looking for a way to stop living’. Whether the pair are talking about their old day jobs, or their rolling life on the road, it's never quite clear. But this ability to sit in ambiguity, to charge at topics with headlong honesty, and to find the rays of light amongst the drudgery of daily life, is what has long driven the deep connection between fans and their music. What might initially look to be a flippant treatment of heavy topics soon reveals itself as deep catharsis, a way to process the Byzantine nuances of modern life. As, for all its talk of death, ‘Massive Champion’ also holds a pervasive love for the quirks and quiddities of the West Country. Whether it be the Wodehouse rhythms of opening tale ‘Poor Bannister’ or the confessional ‘600 Dance Lessons’, it offers a cinéma vérité look at the strange joys of provincial British life, with layers of melodies shimmering like a sunset on the muddy banks of the Severn. For the story of Getdown Services can’t be told without the story of Minehead, of a life far flung from the London bubble, and of a childhood thrown against a parochial world. ‘I’m playing potluck in pigsties with an overactive thyroid, four times a week getting jumped on by a big lad’ bellows Sadler on ‘The Definitive Map’, a diatribe against enclosure and battery farming that could only come from growing up in the geographical margins. Similarly, ‘Lentils’ thrums with joyful resistance to clean living, the pair revelling in malady and malaise. 

Yet, being set apart has also long given the band a marked independence. All their music is self-produced by Law, who routinely draws on an array of influences too vast to definitively list. From doom metal to electro-house to Appalachian folk, the back catalogue of Getdown Services’ is an unending tapestry of weirdo genres, all forever rooted in their teenage love of hard rocking and hellraising. First single ‘The Radiator’ calls back to the DFA classics, inspired by Sadler recalling how ‘he used to threaten his PlayStation 1 when games wouldn’t load quick enough’. But this heavy burst of synths and 808s stands in stark contrast to the Donna Summer disco-pop of ‘Check The Definition’, the downtempo lounge of ‘What’s On Your Mind?’ and the propulsive Neue Deutsche Welle on ‘No One Likes Me’. What’s remarkable is that throughout these canny twists and turns, there always remains the Getdown Services stamp, their uncontainable personality forever rising to the top. Above all, this joy de vive is their secret weapon. It’s powered them through BBC performances, through breaking down on the autobahn, and now through the creation of their best record to date. While their accolades and achievements pile up, they remain rooted to the earth, still working with the tight knit label and team that helped push ‘Crisps’ towards cult fame, still taking time to tour small venues in oft-forgotten parts of the UK. And in a world where everything feels more manufactured, more packaged to go, it's a quiet joy to find a band that refuses to bow to convention, and continues to challenge the norms of success in the industry. As Sadler says, ‘We’d rather not have a barrier between us and the audience. It feels weird playing gigs where they’ve put this big divider to keep the fans away from you. I just don’t understand it.