Big D and the Kids Table bring Boston ska to Handlebar in January

Thirty years into a do-it-yourself career, the Boston ska-punk band plays an $18 Tuesday in Pensacola on Jan. 12 with Omnigone.

A Tuesday in the second week of January is about the quietest night of the year. Big D and the Kids Table plan to fix that. The Boston band plays Handlebar in Pensacola on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2027, with Omnigone opening. The show starts at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are $18 through See Tickets. The date was announced Oct. 27.

That's a two-band ska bill with real history behind it. Big D and Omnigone have shared the road before: a 2025 West Coast run with both bands and The Kilograms started Feb. 28 in San Diego and wrapped March 8 in Portland, Ore., as Scene Point Blank reported when it was announced. Pensacola gets the pairing back together on the other side of the country.

If you've only heard the name, here's the shape of it. Big D and the Kids Table formed in Boston in October 1995, when its members came together in college at Berklee College of Music, according to Wikipedia. They won Outstanding Ska Band at the 1999 Boston Music Awards, and over the years they built a reputation for a strict DIY work ethic, engineering, producing and releasing their own albums and videos. Frontman David McWane has led the band the whole way.

The catalog is long and wanders in interesting directions. *Strictly Rude*, released in March 2007, is the record often credited with turning them from a cool punk-ska band into a must-see one. *Fluent in Stroll* followed in 2009 on SideOneDummy, and *For the Damned, the Dumb & the Delirious* came out on the same label in 2011. In 2013, they put out two albums at once on their own Strictly Rude Records: *Stomp*), a ska-punk record, and *Stroll*), a reggae and dub-influenced set. Band members have kept busy outside it too, including The Doped Up Dollies, co-fronted by McWane's wife, Brianne. The band's label page at Stomp Records is a good place to start digging.

A band that has engineered, produced and released its own records for three decades, for $18 on a Tuesday.

Handlebar holds 300, and that's the right size for this. Ska shows live and die on how close the crowd is to the horns, and a 300-person room on a weeknight means everyone who shows up really wants to be there. There's no balcony to hide in at a show like this; you're going to end up skanking whether you planned to or not.

The price helps. At $18, it's one of the easier calls of the winter, and a 7:30 start keeps a school-night show reasonable for anyone with work in the morning. Get there in time for Omnigone; given the two bands' history on the road together, the opening set is part of the reason this bill exists.

Pensacola's punk and ska crowd doesn't always get a band with this much history on a random Tuesday in January. When one shows up, in a room this size, at this price, the thing to do is clear the calendar and go.

Sources: Big D and the Kids Table (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org); Fluent in Stroll (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org); For the Damned, the Dumb & the Delirious (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org); Stomp (album) (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org); Stroll (album) (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org); 3 ska-centric bands heading to the West Coast (Scene Point Blank) (scenepointblank.com); Big D & The Kids Table (Stomp Records) (stomprecords.com); Tickets (See Tickets) (prod-nts-api.seeticketsusa.us)