Endless Art

"Endless Art"
Single by A House
from the album I Am the Greatest
Released 1992
Genre Indie rock
Label Setanta Records
Writer(s) A House
Producer(s) Edwyn Collins, Dale Griffin

"Endless Art" is a song by Irish indie rock band A House, released initially as the lead track on the "Bingo" EP (1990), and then as a single from their 1991 album I Am the Greatest. (It is also included on the greatest hits album The Way We Were.)

Endless Art

After the commercial failure of their 1990 album I Want Too Much, A House had been dropped from their label, to be picked up by the indie label Setanta Records. They quickly released the EPs Doodle and Bingo, at the end of 1990 and in 1991. The latter included the first appearance of "Endless Art", which A House recorded with Edwyn Collins as producer.[1] Collins went on to work with them on I Am the Greatest from which "Endless Art" was re-released as a single, accompanied by a video.[2]

Although the song did not enjoy huge chart success, it reached number 46 in the UK - an achievement by A House's standards - and it gained a certain amount of airplay on MTV Europe. But for distribution problems, the song might have performed much better commercially. Yet, that one of the A House's most popular successes should be such an unusual song as "Endless Art" confirms their peculiar status as cult favourites. The lyrics to "Endless Art" begin with the line "All art is quite useless according to Oscar Wilde" and for their remainder are mostly a list of the names and birth and death dates of artists from various fields, with the chorus remark: "all dead but still alive, in endless time and endless art". This "list" style of song is characteristic of many of Dave Couse's songs. The majority of the lyrics are declaimed rather than sung, over a repetitive electric guitar motif. Melodically, the song features a quotation from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at the chorus.

Video

"Endless Art" was accompanied by an innovative stop-motion video which received a lot of praise. When Paul King called it quits on MTV's Greatest Hits he played the video for "Endless Art" on his final show as one "of those videos that I really do think deserve to be called great and classic", alongside others such as Thriller and Ashes to Ashes.

Bingo
EP by A House
Released 1991
Genre Indie rock
Label Setanta Records
Producer Edwyn Collins

Sexism

For the first appearance of the song on Bingo, the band received some criticism for the fact that the artists listed in the song are all male, so they recorded a second version where all the artists are female.[3] This is the version called "More Endless Art". In "More Endless Art", the melodic quoatation from Beethoven is substituted with one from Carl Orff, who, it might be quibbled, is not a woman, while the substitution of "Walt Disney's Minnie Mouse" for his Mickey Mouse may not quite right the gender balance either. Still, "More Endless Art" was better than a defence Dave Couse had offered in interviews, that the band had thought that Joan Miró was a woman.

Updated Art

Dave Couse has subsequently performed a live version of "Endless Art" with a new list of artists, those deceased since the original release of the song. This is available as "Endless Art 06" on the B-Side of his single "A Celebration" (2006).

Track listing, "Endless Art" single, 1992

  1. Endless Art
  2. Freak Show*
  3. More Endless Art
  4. Charity*

∗ From a live recording for a John Peel Session on February 2, 1992.[4]

Track listing, "Bingo" EP, 1991

  1. Endless Art
  2. No Love Is Good Enough
  3. Slipping Away
  4. Baby You're Too Much

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Listing for "Bingo" EP at Discogs.com". Discogs.com. Retrieved October 10, 2011.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Listing for "Endless Art" single at Discogs.com". Discogs.com. Retrieved October 10, 2011.
  3. ↑ Strong, Martin Charles (2003). "A House". The Great Indie Discography (2 ed.). Canongate Books. p. 90.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "BBC Peel Session info.". BBC. 1992-02-02. Retrieved October 10, 2011.

External links