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.

Critical reception for Happy Families was mixed, with some reviewers feeling the album trod a sometimes unsuccessful path between experimental aspirations and commercial sensibilities.

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.

"[3] 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...

"[4] 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.