The Toasters - 45 Years of Ska - Glasgow

New York City’s pioneering SKA band The Toasters are going strong 45 years later, with a series of tours spanning North America to Europe in 2026. They are set to bring their sound to various cities as part of their 45 Years in SKA Tour, delivering the high-energy, brass-driven sound that has made them legends of the genre.  “When the world gets turned upside down, when loyalties realign, when everyone expects conformity: Don’t let the bastards grind you down. The Toasters, New York City’s seminal ska band, have lived by this maxim since their founding in 1981 by sole constant Robert “Bucket” Hingley – even if those words waited until 1997 to appear (in the classic bastardized Latin) on a Toasters album of the same name. Formed in an older, grittier NYC, The Toasters lit the fuse on the American ska explosion — the U.S. crest of ska’s second, U.K.-bred wave, following the genre’s birth a generation earlier in Jamaica. At the center of it all was Bucket, a British expatriate working at the Forbidden Planet comic bookstore who simply missed the 2 Tone ska sounds of his homeland. With little scene to speak of, he did what any self-respecting rude boy would do — he started his own band and he hasn’t stopped, wave or no wave. “Whether or not the mainstream media is paying attention to the genre is no real barometer about how well it’s doing,” Bucket tells Pure Honey. “And this ‘wave’ theory of ska is just a nuisance because it’s just one wave that started