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The moniker doesn’t do this band justice; they get up, they get down, they provide the service, they are a thriller addition to every party, event and playlist. If you are for some reason unfamiliar, then indulge in their latest album, ‘Massive Champion,’ a rotary of delectable sonic dioramas, scenes written without rules but for honesty, a raw endeavor that just slaps. Moody, righteous, and lyrically anti-consumptive the album is a genuine press play till end vibe check, an unpredictable strut that proves catchy, notable and pure fun. Wanting to dive into this band, what makes the band be so championship caliber and more, we hung out in a chat room to get the deets:

OnesToWatch: Why do you do what you do? And also, because you guys are a duo, why did you decide to do what you do with each other? 

Josh: We do what we do because I don't know what else we would do.

Ben: You've got to find a purpose in life, and unfortunately having a full-time job is not for me. I don't think it's for anyone.
I don't know anyone on this earth that it's good for. We've managed somehow to claw our way out of that and we're going to try our best to never have to go back to work. 

Josh: We do what we do because it's really, really fun. We feel like we've cracked a formula to just have fun whenever we want, however we want. 

Ben:
We do it together because we probably wouldn't be able to do it with anyone else, to be honest. 

It sounds like you were fated. 

Josh: Yeah, there's no one else. It's not very positive, is it? We've known each other a long time. We really trust each other. We really enjoy each other's company. We enjoy each other's work and taste and it's just endlessly fun. We've been doing it for 6 years now and it just gets more and more rewarding. It's easy to stay driven with something that's so rewarding. That's what drives us.

It's evident that you guys are having fun, so it's very refreshing to see you guys enjoy yourselves. I want to dig into the lore of the group. Getdown Services – when you listen to it, it seems self-evident why you guys named yourself that, but what is the sort of origin story of the name? 

Josh: I think the equivalent in the US is truck stops, but in the UK we call them service stations. They've all got names like Gordano services. 

Ben: Bunky services, T-Bays. The list is endless. 

Josh:
There's hundreds of them and they're just a funny part of UK culture that we love. Getdown Services felt like a service station, but it also felt like we service people to help them get down, whether that's dancing, whether it's ruining the mood. But we had the name way longer than the band existed. We came up with a name and we were like 19. It was floating around for years and years and years. Then the band came along. 

Ben: The name is the hardest part of any band, apart from making the music, I’d say.

It embodies your whole musical persona. So I think it's a perfect title. Let's get into the process a little bit. What does your songwriting process look like as a duo?

Josh: Well, it varies, but generally speaking, we both write lyrics, we write a lot of lyrics separately, and we make this big pool of lyrical ideas. Both of us have loads of different ways of collecting little musical ideas that we will pull up on our phones or start little demos on our computer. We take these snippets of different musical ideas and lyrics and see what grabs us, then build it from there. It's been different on this newest album where we've written songs in a more traditional songwriter-y kind of way. We've had core structures and arrangements before we've started recording. We do all the producing ourselves, and we record it all at home, and so it's just a different process for each song, really. Our song, “The Radiator,” that was the music, words and arrangement were all done in one go, but most often it’s made of all our floating musical ideas pieced together. 

Ben: Josh is really good at seeing a bigger picture for songs. He’s really good at weaving musical ideas and the lyrics together. Josh is also the producer, so that's how it all sounds like it's coming from one place, because it is, and that's Joshua's fingers. 

Brilliant. Your music feels very alive. Do you jam and come up with concepts or is it more in your head and you bring it to the writing session? 

Josh: We very rarely jam together. Once there’s a baseline idea we might take a section and we'll loop it, coming up with different ideas. But most of the time, if there's any kind of jamming, it's us multi-tracking ourselves. And then the collaboration is done in a much less cool way than jamming. It's much more file-based and email-based, that sort of thing. 


So you guys have your own email factory is what you're saying. 

Josh: Yeah, we're plugged into the main frame. 

Let's get into the new project, Massive Champion.
How do you guys decide what goes into a project like that? How did the whole album come together? 

Josh: It was different than anything we've done before. That was on purpose. It felt a bit like we’d been given a kind of surprise opportunity to do a second album and we never would have seen that coming. We never really saw a first album coming. Especially to do it with the kind of time and freedom that we've got where we're full-time musicians now, it felt like an opportunity we didn’t want to waste. We wanted to find the best way to make the most out of the situation. We decided the best way of doing that is to focus on shutting it all out, try to challenge ourselves with songwriting and production and all the little things that we might not have had the time or skillset to focus on before. Basically everything else we've done has been a collection of singles, a load of songs that just were put together. This time, we were set on making an album. Purely for the sake of never having done that before. It was an interesting challenge. There were some lyrical themes that came out that we didn't intend, but it’s where we were pulled. A lot of childhood themes. Quite cool just pulling at a thread and seeing what happens, really. And a lot of the work that's gone into the album as a whole is in the editing and the picking and the decisions that come after the songwriting, which is not something we've ever done before. It was a really rewarding and fun experience and something we’ve never done before. 

Let me ask about the editing. I always find it interesting what you decide to add or leave out – were the decisions thematic, or was it a tempo / tune / style thing? 

Josh: Initially, we wanted it to be 10 songs, but it ended up being more than that. And there was a huge list of ideas.
There were probably about 40-50 ideas that could have gone on to become something on the album. We even scrapped two or three songs really late in the process and replaced them with others. 

Ben: We knew we wanted to do at least 10 songs and that we wanted it to be shorter than the first album. We wanted to do shorter songs. As Josh said, the editing process for that was weirdly more challenging than sort of coming up with the ideas. We had a pretty solid base for what we wanted to aim for, theme-wise, but fitting the stuffing around that was weird. The run order was tough, too. We had this idea of a start, middle and end that we could weave through the tracklist. 

Josh: We were definitely making decisions based on the album rather than individual songs. I always think about Thriller, the biggest album ever. The track listing of that is as big a part of why it’s so good – the way it flows and the fact that it’s short. 

Ben: The nature of how people listen to music, as well, has completely changed. I quite like listening to albums. I know Josh is more of a playlist kind of guy.
But I don't think people really consume music like that anymore. 

Do you have an ambition for the album?
Is there something you hope it does or unlocks for either yourselves or the audience?

Ben: I think like Joshua said, just us putting out and making this album the way that we have. Also, the cover, I'm a big fan of as well, shout out the cover. I think the label definitely has ideas and hopes for it. We just wanted to make something we were happy with and that people also enjoyed. 

Josh: Obviously you want people to like it and all that stuff, but we're very lucky where most of what we want to get out of doing it, we've already got out of it. For the most part, the process of making it and the process of playing it live, that's the bit we get the most out of. You know, you work hard on something and it's great when you can share it and people connect with it. But we've done the bit that drives us. We're already happy with it. There could be a cherry on the cake if people like it and then we can get on with the next one. 


Ben: I'm quite glad that we don't have big expectations or aspirations because I feel like that can really ruin it. This is something we're really proud of and is really good. It'd be a shame if it was like, okay, this needs to sell this amount or get in the charts or whatever. We've managed to just swerve all of that stuff. There's no expectation on us to do short form content or any of that. And that is such a blessing in this day and age. Like, I see that with other bands, it just kills them, that real pressure to just promote themselves constantly. 

Truly. Going to pivot to some more fun questions. Since you mentioned loving performing live, what's the best city or audience you’ve had when performing out there? 


Josh: Maybe Stockholm. 

Ben: I was going to say the best sort of on a whole was probably, we went to Australia recently. We were just really alarmed by how attentive and good the crowds were over there. But yeah, I think the best one off was probably Stockholm. We'd only played in Sweden once before in Gothenburg, and that was also absolutely fucking amazing. But it was just like, Jesus Christ. So many, so, so many people fucking turned up. It was heaven and at the time, the biggest headline we’d done outside of the UK. The atmosphere was just fucking insane. Also, Scandinavians are all really fit and athletic.
So everyone was giving it full beans the whole time.

Good cardio crowd. They're ready. Especially when you're on the road, since you guys do tour quite a bit, what do you guys do to kind of reset, relax, have fun? 
Do you take in the sights? Do you hit local restaurants? 

Ben: We try to. You can go a bit crazy if you just go from the venue to the van to the hotel. When we toured the U.S. one amazing thing about it is that driving is a national passion. Over here, driving is a chore and a thing we don't like doing, but you've turned it into fun. Driving between cities is a great thing to do. We try to eat well generally, but again, we didn't in the U.S. 

Josh: One of the coolest parts about doing this is getting to go to loads of different places. There’s no forcing yourself to walk around because you want to see it. I’m in fucking Chicago. Let's have a little putter about, let's have a look around. We try to sightsee and get around and sleep well. All this stuff's not very rock and roll, but we don't drink too much. We try to eat fruit and vegetables where we can. A big one, a good tip that we try to stick to is remember that you don't have to talk. We have hours and hours of driving where no one says anything and that is quite a good habit to get into. Being on all the time is one of the hardest parts of touring. So yeah, we're getting good at that. Me and Josh have been friends for 17, 18 years, so we're pretty comfortable sitting in silence with each other's company. The people that come on tour with us too, they're all good friends and we keep it pretty tight. So there's no social expectation to mask if you just need to sit there. That's the thing with touring as well, most of it is just waiting. 

Ben: I've been in a habit lately of dancing in the mornings. I'm going to stick to that one going on tour. Put some disc on and wake up and have a dance. 


I definitely think that could set the mood. Last couple of questions. I would love a non-music recommendation from both of you.

Ben: I'm going to say, not that I do this frequently here, but I love it when I do – I went to Japan at the start of the year with my partner, and we were going a lot to saunas and bathhouses, and I honestly just don't think there’s anything better to just completely zen you out. There's something really purifying of the body and the mind. It's therapeutic and it should be free, quite frankly. I know in some countries like Scandinavia, saunas are a big part of the culture and it's really accessible. It's not something we have here at all in the UK and it should be. It's incredible. Also, all that stuff adults say when you're a kid, like “Do exercise, it makes you feel good.” Turns out, that's absolutely true. I try, at least three, 4 times a week, to do some form of exertion. It does really make a difference in your mental state as well as your physical state. 

Josh: I'm going to say, the book Man Eaters of Kamauan by Jim Corbett. I've read it a couple times. It’s about this British guy, Jim Corbett, who went over to India in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and there were man-eating tigers and leopards terrorizing these Indian villages. It's a book about his tales of how to deal with that. Not necessarily catching them and killing them, but protecting the village. It's just really a really interesting book about man-eating animals. It's quite cool. 

You can probably guess what the follow-up is – I would love a music recommendation from you both. 

Ben: I'm going to recommend an album called Ghost Woman by a band called Ghost Woman. It came out in 2022 and it's sort of got 60s psychedelic, guitar garage stuff and it’s absolutely fantastic. It's some really good moments, but the production on it, especially on the song called “Behind Her Eyes.” That's the top pick from that album for me. I absolutely love it. It blisses me out and it's great. 

Josh: I've been talking about this album a lot, but it's not really an album. The best of, the best of the Gap Band. It's a 12 inch collection of their biggest singles, and so there's a lot of instrumentals. They are a really, really great band. I've got a big love for that kind of music and they are about as good as it gets in that world. 

Lastly, just want to end on anything you guys want to share, advice, anecdotes, shout outs, promo, whatever.

Ben: I want to say, as um, as a British pereson, how much I actually loved visiting the U.S. People are incredibly friendly and maybe it's the best country in the world. You guys do optimism so well. 

Josh: The most miserable person in the US is like the most optimistic person in the UK. So it's really, it's really nice to be around. It's infectious. 

Lovely to hear that.