The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?"There are a hundred deadbeat Irish rock wannabees for every A-House, who have just released their fifth and best album No More Apologies. Alan Corr met guitarist Fergal Bunbury and vocalist Dave Couse to talk begrudgery, failure and good songwriting. Every time A House release a record (which is refreshingly often) three things happen. First, the Irish rock media is divided down the middle between those who dismiss them as whinging failures and those who proclaim them a national institution who've made consistently great music. Second, at least 30,000 people go out and buy the new album. Third, and most important, the band themselves get on with recording the next one.

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?"No More Apologies deserves more than that. Now expanded to a six-piece and back on their heart home of Setanta Records (home to The Divine Comedy and Edwyn Collins), A House's newest work is, as they say, their best. It's a stripped down and beautiful thing, with the fragile vocals of Susan Kavanagh and David Morrissey's keyboards playing a huge role. Best of all, vocalist Dave Couse has at last sound a perfect pitch between disaffected ranting and optimistic sentiments in his lyrics.

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?"In the past, the band have been lambasted as elitist artholes with more in common with Beckett than The Buzzcocks, and accused of being archly pretentious failures. In actual fact, in an industry more interested in sales than talent, A House have achieved exactly what they set out to do: simply to create an enduring body of work.

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?""We've realised that for musicians to be ambitious they should really only care about making a good record", Couse says. "As a band we wanted to make a body of work that people would refer to and go back to. The Go Betweens made a great collection of records and I think we've achieved that too."

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?"On the new album, Couse uncovers areas of his own history - Sisters Song, I Can't Change - but he also sheds trendy twentysomething angst with Into The Light and A Happy Ending where he decides, after a decade of bitterness, that hey! "life can be so cool". "I've just become a more contented person, I know what I'm doing," he says. "I know what I expect from a record. I just expect them now to be good and that's all I want. We've given up on being hugely ambitious. Everyone says the lyrics are downbeat and hopeless but I can't understand that. I'm 32 now. When you're young and naive, you want to be a famous rock star and have all the trimmings to go with it. Contentment comes from knowing that we've made a good album."

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?"It's all served up with typical A House humour and the offering will be snapped up by the band's small but very loyal group of fans who are unlikely ever to become legion. A steady flow of positive press, mostly from the UK and Europe (France's Les Rockuptibles has called No More Apologies album of the year, and Q stamped it with a four-star review) has made them huge critical darlings.

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?""The only reason we have friends in the media is because we make good music," says Bunbury. "In Ireland a lot of journalists would understand the band because they've been with us since Kick Me Again Jesus and they understand what we do, and when it comes to this album it's seen as another really strong A House album. It's more difficult in England, people might have missed the first two or three albums. I think some youngsters wouldn't understand us."

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?"It's always been emblematic of A House that they've been out of step with dance music yet No More Apologies does conceal sly touches of hip hop in its more guitar-centric grooves. I Can't Change, for example, employs a gravelly sounding drum machine. However, Twist and Squeeze, a caustic attack on the innate ability of the Irish to begrudge as a national pastime, brings us back to early A House concerns. "I think generally Irish people love to be down there," says Couse. "If someone gets up and does well, we don't slap them on the back and say great. If someone does really well, we go 'Bastard!'. It's begrudgery. People will smile as they stick a knife in your back."

The first single from I Am The Greatest helped both sales and appeal. 'Endless Art', a shopping list litany of deceased cultural icons, is one of the best Irish rock singles of all time. A simple idea executed with style and intelligence, Dave Couse is aware that the song could become a creative albatross around the band's collective neck. "It depends on whether we allow it to be. I don't think A House are like that. Our feeling is that 'Endless Art' is one good song, so why not have a few more?"It's been a long time since A House exploded onto the stage of Dublin's underground club and with the mellow tone and optimism of No More Apologes it's clear that an age of Irish rock music has passed. But if failure, elitism and whinging is what it takes to make music as good as No More Apologies, then play on. "Unless a band is seen on Top Of The Pops or seen in the gossip columns of newspapers all the time," says Couse, "they are deemed a failure. I'd rather be in A House than be in U2. With a monster band like U2 a large amount of people like their records, but a small amount of people love ours."