The Servants was an indie band formed in 1985 in Hayes, Middlesex, England by singer and songwriter David Westlake. The Servants were on 1986's NME-associated C86 compilation, and the expanded 48-song reissue version CD86 in 2006. The Servants was the original home of Luke Haines (leader of The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder). As chronicled in an interview in US music magazine The Big Takeover (issue 53, 2004), Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch was a huge Westlake fan and was trying to locate him during the years that the older singer was dormant in the hopes of forming a band with him, before launching Belle in his school class instead.

The band's Small Time album was well received on its 2012 release, more than twenty years after its 1991-recording. The belated release followed the inclusion of 1990's Disinterest in Mojo magazine's 2011 list of the greatest British indie records of all time.