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It’s a Saturday night in Camden, London, and Getdown Services’ fans are getting the beers in before “Britain’s best band” play one of their final gigs of the year. The Electric Ballroom is heaving, despite this being their second show here in a month. There’s no shortage of twentysomethings with shag hairstyles to explain why the duo live up to their slogan. “They’re fun, which we need right now – life is bleak,” says Dulcie. “And they’re socially aware,” adds her friend Lotte. “Even though they are quite silly, they’re grounded.”
Across the bar, Dylan, 22, says that he finds Getdown Services and their genre-agnostic beats empowering: “They’re a laptop garage band that are having fun doing what they love, and seeing that makes me want to do what I love as well.” His pal James, 29, has returned for a repeat performance. “I came to the other Getdown Services show and I felt more jubilant than I did at Oasis,” he says.
Move over Gallaghers: Ben Sadler and Josh Law come on stage to Status Quo’s Whatever You Want and immediately begin the high-octane crowd interaction. Everyone on the balcony who got guestlist for tonight is pointed to en masse and told to “fuck off”; the pair stomp wide-legged like sumo wrestlers, egging on the roars and occasionally shredding a guitar. It’s part chaotic aerobics video, part Butlin’s gameshow – and though it’s blokey, it’s also a satire of blokey-ness. “This is what my fat body looks like!” yells Sadler, pulling off his T-shirt to delighted cheers. “This is not LadBible!” Law shouts.
Back in Bristol where they’re based, Getdown Services are home-town heroes. No sooner have they stepped into a pub, they’re asked for a photo. They’ve had a mammoth 2025: 130 gigs, two sold-out UK tours, festival stage shut-downs, well over half a million monthly listeners on Spotify and, amazingly for a band with song titles like Vomit, Piss and Shit, a red carpet shout-out from Hollywood A-lister Walton Goggins. “He’s doing PR for us!” quips Sadler, though it’s clear they’re still getting to grips with the attention. “I guess we are bigger than we thought we were,” says Law.
The band’s origin was an “accident”. As childhood friends who met at school in Minehead, Law and Sadler, both now 31, had messed about in various musical projects over the years. But when they started swapping ideas in lockdown while living in different towns, their unselfconscious approach to sound and subject matter clicked: pop culture word association, louche electro-house grooves, and lyrics about snacks and skidmarks. “It feels genuinely liberating to talk about that stuff,” says Law of their more scatological lyrics.
First came debut album Crisps in 2023 – its ace title track is a loafing anti-rockstar anthem that begins “I’ve got choccy in my pocket” – then a succession of EPs, including last year’s Primordial Slot Machine and Crumbs 2. “Low hanging fruit” such as the pop troubadour James Bay and Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals get a ribbing – “being annoying is worse than being evil,” says Law – but these observations are usually a front for social commentary, expressing small-town frustrations and embracing anti-toxic masculinity in all its belly-jiggling messiness: “Wake up, first thought, hope I don’t piss myself today” goes Drifting Away.
Their music shares the same stream-of-consciousness DNA as many of the post-punk shouters who’ve come through in recent years – Fat Dog, Yard Act, Big Special – but their songs are more of a supermarket sweep through a 00s indie disco, especially the chonky electro of Daft Punk and Justice. “I really love that compressed sound; they’re distilling an idea down to something really pure,” says Sadler. “I think that’s in our music a lot. We get compared to the Streets and Sleaford Mods, and I do like that stuff, but the stuff we’re really ripping off seems to go under the radar.”
If there’s a shared vision, it’s that “there’s a real desire to crack each other up”, says Law. Their influences include the TV shows Bottom, Alan Partridge and Phoenix Nights; indeed, it’s easy to imagine Peter Kay delivering lines like those on Caesar: “I don’t care if you’re working class / You’re a fucking twat / You don’t care about music / You just like trousers”. But Getdown Services stress they’re not a musical double act like Tenacious D; they’re a band that happens to be funny. “As soon as someone says ‘it’s comedy’, the joke’s gone,” says Sadler.
And besides, there’s lots to be serious about. In August, they slammed Victorious festival for censoring another band’s pro-Palestine protest (Getdown donated their fee for playing the same festival to charity) and they call out transphobia on social media. “A lot of people see two white blokes with their tops off, shouting and swearing, and probably think we align with that [macho behaviour],” says Sadler, “and it’s nice to remind people that we’re not on that side.”
As for 2026, there’s a second album in the works and while big labels have been knocking on their door, they’re happy on the independent Bristol label Breakfast Records. And what about that tagline? It started as a joke, they say, but now they’re owning it. In the beginning, “we were barely even a band,” says Law, “and now I think maybe we are Britain’s best band.”
