The first time I bought Definitely Maybe, it had very little to do with Oasis. I just wanted to be like my big brother.
It was 1994. I was ten years old, in Woolworths in Braintree with my mum and brother. My brother already had a copy of the album, but he wouldn’t let me borrow it. So I saved up and bought my own.
That’s how this story starts. Not with some grand revelation about rock and roll, but with a younger brother wanting what his older brother had. I remember the shop, who I was with, and how much I wanted to get home and listen to it.
Thirty-two years later, I’ve still got that very same Definitely Maybe CD. And it still plays.
Everything around it changed
That was the thought that stopped me in my tracks. Here was this little disc from 1994, still doing the job I bought it to do. Same tracklist. Same recordings. Nothing new added, nothing taken away.
Yet almost everything around it has changed. Woolworths has gone. The way we find, buy and listen to music has changed beyond recognition. I’ve grown up, worked different jobs, met people, and lived a whole life that the ten-year-old standing in that shop couldn’t possibly have imagined.
And through all of it, this CD has quietly stayed with me.
It’s easy to look at an old album and think only about the songs. But when I hold this one, I remember far more than the music. I remember where I bought it, who was there, and who I was at the time.
It’s not just a CD. It’s a snapshot of where I was and who I was back then.
The music stayed the same. I didn’t.
Of course, when I put Definitely Maybe on now, it takes me straight back. But I don’t always hear it in the same way. Some days it’s pure nostalgia. On others, depending on my frame of mind, something in a song hits differently than it did before. I’ve felt that same shift revisiting Oasis’s Dig Out Your Soul.
The recordings haven’t changed. I have.
And perhaps the strangest thing is that I didn’t even buy the album for the music in the first place. I bought it because my brother had it and I wanted to be like him. But over the years Oasis became part of who I am; that Britpop sound has never really gone away for me. What began as a little brother copying his big brother grew into one of the first buds of my own passion for music.
That passion eventually led me to pick up instruments, write songs and spend more time than I can count listening closely to records. It’s part of why Imminent Infinity exists today. I certainly wasn’t thinking about any of that in Woolworths. I just wanted my own copy.
More than something to play
I use modern ways of listening to music too, and this isn’t an argument that streaming is somehow wrong. Having so much music at your fingertips is extraordinary. But there’s a different sort of connection to an object you went out and bought, especially one you saved up for as a kid.
A stream can take me back to a song. That little piece of physical history can take me back to the shop, the people and the anticipation of getting home. I can remember the reason I wanted it before I’d even really made the music my own.
I don’t think every CD has a story like that, and it doesn’t have to. But some of them end up carrying far more than the music pressed onto them.
In 1994, I was ten years old and wanted to be like my big brother. In 2026, I’m looking at the CD I bought that day and realising how much of my life has happened since.
Woolworths is gone. The world has moved on. I’m not that ten-year-old anymore.
But I’ve still got the CD I bought that day. And every time I press play, some part of that ten-year-old comes back.
