Happy Families by Blancmange

Happy Families, Blancmange's debut album, arrived on London Records on 24 September 1982, and it's the Harrow duo of Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe making synth-pop that's as wry as it is danceable. Arthur's deadpan baritone does the talking while Luscombe's keyboards bleep, burble and nag at your ear, and the whole thing hovers somewhere between the arty and the danceable.

The song that cracked it open was "Living on the Ceiling", the album's third single, which came out the month after the record and became the pair's breakthrough, an odd, twitchy, exotic-sounding hit that still sounds like nothing else from that year. Arthur thought enough of the record to go back and cut it again, decades later, as Happy Families Too... in 2013.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.