Happy Families is the debut studio album by the English synth-pop band Blancmange, released on 24 September 1982 by London Records. It peaked at No. 30 on the UK Albums Chart, aided by the success of the album's third single, "Living on the Ceiling", released the following month, which became Blancmange's breakthrough hit, reaching No. 7 in the UK Singles Chart. A re-recorded version of the album, titled Happy Families Too..., was released in 2013.[2]
Initial pressings of the album in 1982 contained the original version of "Waves" – on later pressings and on the subsequent CD issues this version was replaced by the 7" single version, which had been remixed by Denis Weinrich and the band's manager John Owen Williams, and included re-recorded vocals and a string section arranged by Linton Naiff. The original version remained unavailable on any format until its inclusion on the 2012 compilation album The Very Best of Blancmange. The Canadian release of the album had a slightly rearranged running order and included a special mix of the song "Blind Vision", released as a single in May 1983 and which appeared on the group's second studio album Mange Tout in the UK in 1984.
In 2008 Edsel Records reissued Happy Families as a remastered and expanded version titled Happy Families... Plus. This version of the album added six bonus tracks to the original ten-track album: the extended versions of the singles "God's Kitchen", "Feel Me" and "Living on the Ceiling"; two instrumental mixes of "Feel Me"; and the instrumental track "Business Steps" (originally the B-side of "Waves"). However, Happy Families... Plus featured the 7" single versions of not just "Waves" but also "Living on the Ceiling", rather than the original album versions.
Melody Maker flexidisc
Excerpts of the songs "Living on the Ceiling" and "Sad Day" featured on one side of a flexi disc given away free with the issue of Melody Maker dated 24 April 1982. The other side of the disc featured the song "Born Every Minute" by the Passage.
Critical reception for Happy Families was mixed, with some reviewers feeling the album trod a sometimes unsuccessful path between experimental aspirations and commercial sensibilities. Melody Maker stated that "touting the chalk and cheese, odd couple image, [Arthur and Luscombe]'s misfit marriage of experimentalism and unprepossessing pop was always in grave danger of belittling itself into an English Eighties parody of Sparks, parodying Joy Division, aping Depeche Mode... Happy Families, their debut album, is every bit the entertaining disappointment that anyone familiar with Blancmange's nervous live shows had a right to expect... Their brave schizophrenia is invariably self-defeating, their adventurously varied song treatments befuddling where a more open, honest approach could have unearthed brilliance."[4]
NME said that "Happy Families is a calmly assured collection of work: maybe not stamped with greatness, quite, but there's not a number in the whole ten that's without appeal, intelligence and warmth... There's impressive, though never overstated, drama in their delivery and winning ingenuity in their arrangements: a nicely controlled excitement... the flaws are minor and the merits are major."[5]Smash Hits felt that the album "occupies a curious no-man's land between near criminal stylistic nicking from a cast of thousands (everyone from OMD to Yazoo, from Simple Minds to Talking Heads) and [the] nagging near-certainty that the guilty pair have real talent... meanwhile their good taste in pilfering is well worth investigating."[6]
Track listing
All songs written and composed by Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe.
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