SUITED, booted and ready to party, the Gentleman’s Dub Club are the dapper knights of dub, dubstep and roots reggae.

They are famed for their frenzied gigs, a reputation which has earned them coveted slots at the world’s greatest festivals, including Glastonbury and Bestival.

Few bands combine sweet soul, driving bass and rabble-rousing like this elegant nine-piece, as the lads explain.

“Our live show is a lot of fun,” says singer Johnny Scratchley.

“We have an unspoken ethos in the band,” agrees sax man Kieran Gallagher. “We just try to make every gig more weird and mad than the last. We go absolutely mental.”

Nine members is certainly a hefty number for a band. How did they get it together?

“We all linked up in Leeds and spent a lot of time just messing about up there,” says Johnny. “There is only one Northerner in the band and he wasn’t in there originally. He is from Darlington. Now we are all down in London.

“I live with the bass player and the keyboard player lives just around the corner. It is all pretty in-bred.

“There are actually eight of us on stage, with Harry Devenish as the sound engineer.”

So how it did all begin?

“We’ve been gigging since 2006, that’s when things started off,” says Johnny.

“It began just after we found an old delay unit (a speaker). We’d spend five or six hours at a time just messing around. Then Harry came down and organised it into a band.

“I remember Ed our keyboard player saying ‘this lad called Harry’s trying to get this band together, would you like to come and play?’,” chips in Kieran. “I was like – yeah!”

On Saturday the gang go the whole nine yards, with a gig at Oxford’s O2 Academy. It looks like being a lively night...and that’s putting it mildly.

“I find it very difficult to control myself,” says Johnny. “I am probably the one that always goes too far.

“I love seeing the energy,” adds Kieran.

“It’s the type of music we play,” Johnny goes on. “It’s got real soul and you have to dance to it. On stage we mirror what goes on in front of us.”

What, I wonder, is life like on tour with a firm as big and discerning, as the GDC. What do they request in the way of backstage hospitality – known in the business as ‘the rider’?

“We have a massive rider because there are loads of us,” says Johnny. “As you get more professional you learn to ask for more outrageous things. The cheese platter has been a brilliant introduction.”

Kieran concurs. “It’s quite interesting seeing how different promoters view what a cheese platter is. Some will go the extra mile and get you the Stilton, some just the Cheddar and Red Leicester.

“Some don’t even get you the Red Leicester and there often isn’t even any crackers,” says Tommy Evans. “Sometimes not even a knife!”

So, what next for the gents? Do they have a plan for global domination? Well, yes.

“We’re just going take over the world really!” jokes Johnny, adding more seriously. “No, we are looking to get our releases nailed. We managed to achieve quite a level of recognition from gigs but we hadn’t done any recording.

“Over the past two years we have been making those concerted efforts to become a recording band as well as a live band.

“We all get on really well. It is so rare that can happen...and long may it last!”