Its single "Is This the Life" saw brief chart success due to exposure on mainstream radio, and garnered the attention of a wider audience when it entered the Independent Top 10 in the UK, peaking at number 80.

The album was loosely conceptualised as a performance by a band of clowns under the tyranny of the Alphabet Business Concern label and the fictional characters of the Consultant and Miss Swift, an idea that was conceived on the Seaside Treats video.

With manager Mark Walmesley and engineer Graham Simmonds (previously a Cardiacs member), the group coloured much of the recordings with sound effects and orchestration, as exemplified on "A Little Man and a House", "The Breakfast Line" and "Victory Egg".

[9] The publication in the UK of Smith's remarks about him and his wife "sharing the same mum and bed" then embroiled the band on controversy when the story was published in the Sunday Sport.

[14] Smith also produced, directed and acted in the short film Seaside Treats[15] and played brass with his wife on the Sound's third EP Shock of Daylight.

[16] Whilst recording the Seaside album, Smith started writing longer, more theatrical compositions, inspired by the likes of the Red Krayola, Devo, Frank Zappa and Slapp Happy.

[17][18] According to music journalist Sean Kitching, this initiation into avant-garde afforded Cardiacs some of the "most sublime and effortlessly happy moments" that defined the group's next project, A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window.

The addition of keyboardist William D. Drake in the lineup also revamped the Cardiacs sound,[19] along with Smith taking over vocals after Mark Cawthra left in 1983.

[28] In 1985, the Seaside Treats video album introduced the concept of the Alphabet Business Concern label having tyrannical power over the band.

[36] A re-recording of the song "Is This the Life" was released as a single in March 1988, managing to chart due to exposure on mainstream radio,[37] peaking at number 80 in the UK.

[3] A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window was originally released on vinyl LP and cassette by the band's record label Alphabet Business Concern, on 21 March 1988.

"Just when you thought Marillion had taken us to the very limit along comes this schizo-progressive anachronism wherein the Cardiacs have telescoped the entire dreggs of the early seventies into one album so geriatric, by comparison that the next Blue Öyster Cult will sound as fresh as Viva Hate.

A Little Man... is the very worst bits of Tommy stretched out to an eternity; it's Emerson, Lake & Palmer; it's Brain Salad Burglary as the NME of its day might have said.

By way of variation 'In a City Lining' knocks off one of those Neil Young/Mission cryogenic guitar solos and to bewilder us completely there is a nutty body-stomp midway through "Is This the Life" which resides about as comfortable as Ian Paisley in the Vatican.

It is grandiloquent in the way that certain classical music is - particularly the work of Charles Ives - often with several harmonies and melodies developing and converging within the structure of a single song.