Day 23 - Follow That Star - St Agnes Fountain

When you've been doing something for ten years there's a tendency to assume you've gone about it exactly the same way. That's hardly ever the case though, and there's certainly been a lot of changes here on the Advent Calendar.

Staggeringly it now seems, when I first started this, there was no such thing as YouTube and the main way of listening to music was via Myspace. Most of the songs I added in those first few years, I couldn't find online so I just had to explain what I was listening too and hope someone was sufficiently interested enough to find the track somewhere else.

Even more surprisingly, the Calendar first ran on two football sites at WestHamOnline and ESPN. It still continues at the former, the latter would probably have a seizure if I tried it now.

With the advent - no pun intended - of YouTube, it then became possible to bed the songs into a post and, five years in, I was even able to create a blog - thanks to Blogger - to run daily so I didn't have to rely on the football outlet. I then needed to go back and shoehorn the existing songs into the blog. Over those intervening years there has been a seismic difference in the availability of tracks. Virtually all of the nearly 250 songs now have a link with only a handful still being unavailable or regularly pulled for some copywrite infringement.

It was inevitable I suppose that there would now be time for another change and it came about because I've wanted to add St Agnes Fountain's 'Follow That Star' for several years but could only ever link to an in-concert version. Now the Aggies are wonderful live and their  signature tune is never a disappointment. But I wanted to add the studio version that I first heard on the 'MidWinter' boxset, but it was nowhere to be found.

So, first the first time ever this November, I added my own YouTube post of 'Follow That Star' with - what else could I use? - the photos from Lady B's Kitsch Christmas Tree. Along with that I've also added several other YouTube posts to update previous links that I've not been happy with. I'll let you find them yourself, if you're interested.

In the meantime, Lady B's tree is now immortalised forever - or at least until the Internet reaches its end and closes down and YouTube is phased out with the songs streamed directly into our brains.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" as my Old Gran used to say.