Blancmange - Happy Families (1982)

I had a couple of singles and happily taped the hits off the wireless, but Blancmange otherwise passed me by, or at least failed to have quite the same impact as Soft Cell - another couple of blokes with a synth newly arisen from the grooves of Some Bizarre Album. To say that Blancmange seemed tame in comparison to Soft Cell may be redundant on the grounds that everybody seemed tame in comparison  to Soft Cell, at least for a couple of months back there; and on the other hand, at least Blancmange seemed to know who they were, unlike Depeche Mode - the other sons of that same creative flowering, roughly speaking - who seemed to want to be a different group every couple of weeks and yet always sounded like what happens when you press the demo button on a Casio VL Tone, even after that weekend when they found those special grown-up sex clothes in a trunk at the back of dad's wardrobe.

So I hadn't really thought about Blancmange in nearly thirty years, which might seemingly characterise their having been a bit of an Alan Partridge act, forever doomed to supply cosily literal soundtracks to quirky regional news features about people who live on the ceiling, or who've seen a word, or who can't explain something. Then I found this in a record store in Austin and remembered that I'd vaguely intended to buy it at some point; and it's not half bad.

Blancmange chose the name as something pink and silly, in contrast to other bands of the time naming themselves the Dark Satanic Mills or the Bleak Industrial Cooling Towers - as Neil Arthur once explained on the wireless, the tape of which I still have somewhere - which makes a lot of sense with hindsight. Bands reliant on synths and drum machines were a novelty back in 1982, but not that much of a novelty, and what distinguished Blancmange was music rooted in soul, big band, Burt Bacharach, James Brown, things which jam and demonstrate familiarity with African rhythm. There's not much trace of Johnny Thunders here, not even a lot Bowie, and if Soft Cell were the Velvet Underground with sequencers, then Blancmange were something in the region of the Talking Heads; which is an odd thing to realise, but Happy Families really does sound like a cousin to Remain in Light what with the soulful choruses, the choir, the rhythmic build up and Neil Arthur's peculiarly self aware lyrics.

I thought Happy Families would be okay, but I didn't realise it would be quite so solid and enduring as it is, and I've Seen the Word is still a beautiful piece of music.