Endless Art
| "Endless Art" | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Single by A House | |
| from the album I Am the Greatest | |
| Released | 1992 |
| Genre | Indie rock |
| Label | Setanta Records |
| Songwriter(s) | A House |
| Producer(s) | Edwyn Collins, Dale Griffin |
| Bingo | |
|---|---|
 |
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| EP by A House | |
| Released | 1991 |
| Genre | Indie rock |
| Label | Setanta Records |
| Producer | Edwyn Collins |
"Endless Art" is a song by Irish indie rock band A House, released initially as the lead track on the "Bingo" EP (1991), 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.)
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. 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.
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.
"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.
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