Getdown Services: 'Rockstars used to sing about smashing 15 pints. Now people can’t afford that'

If art’s job is to hold a mirror up to society, then society might prefer not to look at what Getdown Services have to show it. The Bristol dustbin disco duo’s junk food-obsessed sprechgesang songs with a south-western twang – think The Streets for the Just Eat generation – rail at capitalism, consumerism, landlords and lad culture through savagely funny stream-of-conscious rants packed with petty anger, bodily functions and bad language.

The band’s forthcoming riotously entertaining second album, due late summer, is the follow-up to a 2023 debut titled quite simply Crisps. From burgers and hot dogs to pizza, Fox’s Glacier Mints and Wispa Golds, Josh Law and Ben Sadler’s lyrics read like a crumpled, crumbs-encrusted receipt found in your pocket after a late-night drunken raid on the 24-hour shop.

Surreal, silly, vulnerable and self-lacerating at times, yet always tempered with a wicked sense of humour. “Forgotten, wasted and singed,” goes one line in Getdown Services’ breakout single Dog Dribble, “I’m a burnt chip getting sent to the food bin.”

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“If The Libertines had been singing about Monster Munch, no one would have given a shit,” concedes guitarist and vocalist Law. But times have changed, and food has become a kind of nihilistic symbol through which the band addresses the world and its problems.

“People are generally a bit more hopeless about the future,” Law reflects. “People can’t afford houses or whatever else. Food has kind of crept in as this carrot on a stick.”

“I think it is the present day’s version of drugs and alcohol,” co-vocalist Sadler adds. “Rockstars used to sing about smashing 15 pints. Now people can’t really afford to do that.”

“It’s also just quite funny,” Law continues. “It’s familiar. Everyone’s got to eat, and there’s just something quite funny about that. 

“Like quiche in particular,” he deadpans, referencing Getdown Services’ Fatboy Slim-punning banger Eat Quiche, Sleep, Repeat. “Quiche is quite a funny item of food, when you think about it.”

Whatever the band’s secret recipe may be, listeners  are responding with an increasingly ferocious appetite. A steady build has seen the duo play something like 250 shows in the last two years, in increasingly larger rooms filled with ever madder, sweatier audiences. Sadler and Law are typically shirtless and stagediving by the end.

This spring and summer bring a sold-out US tour, followed by over a dozen major UK and European festivals. By autumn, Getdown Services will be firmly established as one of Britain’s most beloved new bands.

They speak to Big Issue days after their biggest gigs to date, opening for Swedish punks Viagra Boys at London’s 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace (“beyond anything we thought we’d ever be doing,” admits Sadler). They’ve just discovered they’ve been invited to take part in the Harry Styles-curated Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre this June.

“I can’t really describe what I did with my body when we got that news, it’s fucking mental,” says Law, laughing. “I’m quite a big Harry Styles fan to be honest.”

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To fully appreciate why all this is so thrilling for the duo, you need only wind back a few years to when Law was working as a gardener in Bristol and Sadler was pulling pints in pubs in Manchester. Success couldn’t have seemed further away, and both were, by their own admission, “quite unhappy people”. Both in their late 20s, they had become gripped by an ennui familiar to many. 

“One of the things that was getting us both down was this endless feeling of working for the rest of our lives in something we don’t want to do,” recalls Law. The pair had been mates since childhood and played in bands in their teens, but drifted away from music – and from each other – after Sadler moved to Manchester.

During the pandemic, they started swapping song fragments online: “disco-y ideas”, as Law describes them, just for a laugh. Ideas eventually became songs, and then gigs. It soon turned into, if nothing else, a good excuse to hurtle up and down the motorway at weekends to write, rehearse and hang out. 

“A big part of it at the start was it was just a really nice way for us to spend time together,” Law says.

Then as now, spending time together involved getting shirtless to a thumping backing track and throwing themselves around rooms. Whether it’s a half-empty pub in Devon or a packed arena, be sure that Getdown Services will play it with the same messy, funny intensity that has defined their live act from the start.

“The tops off and screaming at people, that was there from day one,” Law claims. “Maybe something kicked in in the first couple of gigs where it was like, this backing track thing isn’t interesting enough for us, we need to add something else.”

The Getdown Services lyrical universe is, as they explain it, basically one big song. Everything comes from a shared bank of fragmentary ideas stored in notes apps, from which they pick and choose lines to suit a track’s mood. So, whether they are laying into a certain celebrity chef on Get Back Jamie, or telling unscrupulous landlords what they think of them on Biscuit Tin (“bootleg jean dullard cunt”), it all comes from the same place.

“A general kind of confused, unhappy, listless, frustrated feeling,” as Law describes it. Most often, they express themselves through laughter. “It’s a very British thing,” Sadler says, “to laugh at things that make you really unhappy.”

Dog Dribble (2024) remains the standout hit to date – a rocking diatribe on anxiety, disorientation and self-image set to a gloriously big AC/DC-esque riff. Last summer, they were invited to perform a stripped-down version backstage at Glastonbury for the BBC. In front of a live TV audience of millions, Sadler – frazzled from weeks of non-stop gigging and thrown by a last-minute warning not to swear on the Beeb – forgot the words, and needed Law to jump in to rescue him.

It should have been a disaster, yet something about the affable chaos of it, and the way the duo pushed on regardless and had each other’s backs, ensured that it wasn’t.

“I think looking back, it actually made it better,” says Sadler. “Because these things always go well on the telly when you watch them. Whereas this one was like: oh god, what is happening?”

Earlier this year, I wrote about Getdown Services for Big Issue as part of a wider piece on body positivity among male artists unafraid to let it all hang out on stage. The band shared the article on Instagram, noting that, while they don’t see taking their tops off as “radical”, it’s “really nice to hear it might be to some people”. Body neutrality is closer to what they aim for, they say – being matter-of-fact about body shape and size to render it a non-issue.

Behind all the chocolate and quiche gags lies a more sombre side to Getdown Services’ food fixation: binge eating as a response to emotional issues. “Comfort eating is something that I’ve turned to a few times in my life,” Sadler admits.

“Sitting down and eating a 12-pack of crisps, rightly or wrongly, can be a very big comfort. And something that I actually do see as quite a big part of my identity, to be honest,” he adds.

Anyone worried about Getdown Services’ diet can feel encouraged by their new album, though. One track is named after a nutritional powerhouse. 

“It’s quite funny to us to have a song on the first album that’s called Crisps,” says Law, “and then one on the next album called Lentils.”

Getdown Services’ second album is released later this year on Breakfast Records; new single The Radiator is streaming now; the band play Harry Styles’ Meltdown Festival on 16 June.

More Getdown Services festival dates here

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