I was in B&Q last Saturday, standing in the grouting aisle trying to find the smallest possible amount of grout for a single tile repair. The bathroom is being replaced soon anyway, so the whole exercise felt faintly absurd. I just needed enough to fix one gap temporarily, and everything on the shelf came in quantities designed for someone tiling an entire hotel.
I was still working through this when a voice appeared at my shoulder asking if I needed help. I started explaining, the single tile, the temporary repair, the forthcoming bathroom replacement, and while I was talking I became aware that the face attached to the voice looked familiar. I couldn’t place it. He could. Mid boring grout conversation, he said: “You probably recognise me from Kenny’s. I used to see you and your son there.”
It took a moment to process. Not just the recognition, but the fact that he recognised me, and knew exactly where from. He remembered my son. He asked how he was doing. I told him he was in Glasgow, studying, still playing guitar, still writing his own songs, still refusing to compromise a single haircut. His face lit up in a way that had nothing to do with customer service. That was someone who still cares deeply about the thing that was taken from him.
We stood in the grouting aisle for longer than either of us expected.
Three weeks from now, my son plays his first live gig with his band at Ivory Blacks in Glasgow. [3] I don’t think the man from Kenny’s will ever know that. But in a strange way, he’s part of the reason it’s happening.
Kenny’s Music was not just a shop. The people who worked there were passionate about music in a way that was immediately obvious and completely genuine. They were kind, knowledgeable, and they had the particular gift of making you feel like you could create something. Nobody rushed you. Nobody made you feel like you needed to know more than you did before you were allowed to be there.
My son could play power chords and not much else when we first walked in. We spent a long time trying a couple of guitars. The staff let us get on with it. He left with his first electric guitar and a small amplifier, and over the years that followed the guitars multiplied, the amplifier grew to something that could rattle windows, and the effects pedals accumulated until he was writing his own songs as a teenager.
The chain had actually enjoyed its strongest ever sales figures before it closed in October 2025. It wasn’t a failing business that quietly wound down. The managing director said it plainly: “it’s become impossible to operate sustainably as a predominantly bricks and mortar musical instrument retailer in the UK in 2025.” [1] Rising costs, shrinking margins, and pressures from above did what declining footfall alone hadn’t managed. The Aberdeen store went down with the ship, not because it had failed, but because the ship had.
I walked past the empty shell of it a few days ago. It looks sad.
He ended up there because places like Kenny’s don’t get to survive in the world we have today.
When I got home I read the local election results. I wasn’t surprised, but I was sad in a way that has become familiar.
I watch the rise of Reform and I think about what it must have felt like to be a reasonable person in Germany in the late 1920s, watching something gain momentum that you could see was wrong but couldn’t find anyone with the platform or the courage to effectively challenge. I’m not drawing a direct comparison. I’m describing a pattern, the anger, the propaganda, the compelling simplicity of having someone to blame, and the absence of anyone offering a clear enough alternative vision to compete with it. I’ve read enough history to know how that pattern ends.
I remember the morning Tony Blair won. “Things Can Only Get Better” felt genuinely true for a moment. I was optimistic in a way I hadn’t been about politics before and haven’t been since. The slow realisation that it was a performance rather than a promise left a mark, not just on me but on a generation of people who wanted to believe that mainstream politics could actually deliver something. Keir Starmer is doing the same thing in slow motion and it makes me deeply disappointed in a way that feels almost personal.
What fills the space when mainstream politics fails to inspire is not nothing. It is Farage. It is Trump. It is the oldest trick in the political book, find the anger, name an enemy, and offer the relief of blame instead of the difficulty of solutions. It works because it feels like action. It isn’t.
I regularly listen to Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” They are an unlikely pair, a former Labour spin doctor and a former Tory minister, and they disagree often. But they do it in a way that feels like two people actually trying to think rather than two people performing their tribe. Rory uses a phrase that has stayed with me: “we can agree to disagree agreeably.” It sounds simple. In the current climate it sounds almost radical.
That is what Kenny’s felt like, actually. A place where people with different tastes and different levels of ability and different budgets could walk in and be treated as if what they wanted to create mattered. No tribe. No enemy. Just the shared belief that music was worth making.
We need more of that and less of everything else.
References
[1] Press and Journal – Kenny’s Music closes for good at Aberdeen’s The Green
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/6882009/kennys-music-shop-aberdeen-closed/
[2] Guitar World – Kenny’s Music set to return under new ownership
https://www.guitarworld.com/music-industry/kennys-music-set-to-return
[3] Ivory Blacks, Glasgow – Official Website
https://ivoryblacks.com/