In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, The Getdown Services, the duo of Josh Law and Ben Sadler, compared themselves to CBBC’s Dick & Dom. “You see blokes who seem to have absolutely no dignity or self worth at all, chucking mushy peas at a load of kids. I think we touch a similar sort of thing.”
The band are becoming more well known for their bizarre on-stage theatrics – this has always been their approach, but it happened incidentally. Originating out of lockdown, they were joking around and making one another laugh, something which has since become a core aspect of Getdown Services’ routine. “It was never really the plan, but it’s always been how we’ve dealt with it all, without really deciding to,” says Josh.
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The band’s cover art shares a similar comedic, bizarre quality. This includes quite a random array of subjects, from random food items to sinister humanoid chip shop statues. “We thought it was sort of like a one-off thing, like ‘eugh, that’s fuck ugly!’, and then playing in mainland Europe, they’re absolutely everywhere,” says Ben. Josh joins in: “we thought we had some special thing, but they’re literally everywhere in Belgium. It’s sort of like putting the Colonel on your album cover.”
When discussing the latest EP, ‘Your Medal’s In The Post’, Josh describes it as being the first artwork of theirs where a concept has come first.
“There’s a lot of stuff on the EP about class tensions, and how confusing the class system is in this country… [there’s] a lot of issues and questions about entitlement and things like that. There’s quite a big difference between the class backgrounds of me and Ben, but we also really connect on most levels, so I think we just thought it would make sense to have our parents be the artwork, because it’s going to be interesting. It sums up the very different financial situations… how confusing, frustrating and difficult the whole thing is.”
“They’re our parents,” says Ben, “they mean a lot to us. It’s mad that we’ve got to where we are to a point where we’re releasing something else that people might actually want to listen to. So it makes sense to put our background as the image for that.”
On an even more wholesome note, Josh declares “we just wanted to have a nice picture of our parents.”
Getdown Services have a fairly self-evident rock and disco orientated influence, citing acts like T. Rex, Daft Punk, Chic and AC/DC, all of whom become increasingly more apparent on the new EP – they have also been likened to sleaford mods and LCD Soundsystem.
“With the sleaford mods thing,” says Ben, “I can sort of see that, mainly because it’s spoken word, two blokes, laptop, and a lot of swearing!”
Josh and Ben have known each other for years – they went to school together and have been in several bands together before this – but Getdown Services was a lockdown project. Would it have existed without that?
“No, I don’t think it would,” Josh says. “I don’t think it would have occurred to us to do it, we were both working all the time before lockdown.” The fact that the end of lockdown coincided with them making more music resulted in them playing gigs, an excitement that came from the end of this. Ben says “lockdown led to us being at home all the time, really bored, and sending stuff back and forth to each other, so we just had loads of spare time to plough into this thing.”
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Getdown Services don’t have any practice spaces, nor do they use studios. All of their output is recorded and produced by themselves at home. Given that this was a COVID project, it begs the question of whether the pandemic influenced, if not determined in any way, what the music sounds like.
Josh: “I never really thought about that… I’d say definitely. Just because of the free time to focus on learning how to record.”
Ben: “We’ve always made music at home, for each other. We’d have never wanted to make music seriously enough to go into a studio again… it was probably never on the cards. In lockdown you’re doing it yourself, anyway, so I guess it turned out that way.”
Musically, the band has changed pace since those initial recordings – certain songs from the album are somewhat melancholy in comparison to more recent tracks which are notably more Bolan/Daft Punk-esque. Ben provides the reason: “We’re less angry, we’re less sad and depressed, and less distracted.”
Josh: “If you spend all your time doing something you hate, you’re going to be miserable, and we spend all our time doing something we like, now, so the music’s a bit more uplifting, I think. Unless some kind of major crisis happens, I think we’re probably just gonna keep it ‘party-time’. [But] we enjoy complaining about things.”
“We love a whinge,” laughs Ben.
Josh picks up on this: “We love whinging. Even when you feel good, I just love to complain about things, I think that’s always going to be in the music. But the anger and the bitterness is just changing form, I think.”
For all the humour, this intensely creative project is continually evolving. Ben adds: “We have talked about doing another album – we want to do something quite different. Maybe a bit more, not ‘singer-songwriter’, but consider the songwriting of the songs, and production techniques and stuff. We’ll still be making music, so it’ll still be the same band, it’s not gonna be a million miles off. Just keeps it interesting for us.”
Josh continues: “Always try and do something different, is the only thing. I don’t mean this in an arrogant way, it’s really nice that we’ve got an audience now. But, us making music is completely irrelevant to that, we’d be doing it as we’re doing it, even if that wasn’t there. We just really need it as an outlet.”
Finishing, his Getdown Services comrade-at-arms Ben says: “It started out that way, so for that to change would sort of be ingenuine. It does help and it’s really lovely that people listen to us now, but it’s not rested on that. If everyone who was involved suddenly started hating us, it would be like ‘that’s a shame, but we’re going to keep going anyway’, it might sound corny but I do really believe that. It would take a lot for us to stop now.”
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Words: Tobias Partington
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