When I was 16, I was fucking miserable. Almost everyone is miserable at 16. If you aren’t, then you’re damn lucky. For me at least, 1990 was a terrible year. I was a child, yet felt everything acutely – in a way that was magnified by the vexatious cruelty of both rampant hormones, and being painfully broke. The only time I was happy was when I was escaping from the world I lived in. When I was listening to music. “Happiness”, by The Beloved, which has just been reissued in a bells-and-whistles double CD edition was my portal – when I was 16 – to a world where Not Everything Was Fucking Shit.

Of course, everyone’s experience of a record is different. For the band, this record was an attempt to capture the euphoria of clubs I didn’t even know existed, and certainly never could have gone to, because I was too young and too skint. It felt like these songs were secret transmissions caught from 4am in a nightclub 128 miles away. I listened to this record to try to get an impression of happiness – something that was a couple of decades away from me. Sure, I had moments of happiness, fleeting glimpses, fractions when everything else fell away – when money, debt, health, heartbreak, hunger, and reality disappeared for what felt like four minutes at a time – but this record was something I hid inside rather than face a grey and concrete 1990 Britain where I was a forgotten child in a dead suburb.

Heck, to me, this record was vinyl prozac. From the opening, witty “Hello” to the final, and soothing “Found” - “Happiness” was a dose of hope. And unlike so many similar bands of the time, it wasn’t a toploaded selection of obvious hits and filler. Each song was a self contained slice of perfect pop – one that recognised the inherent sadness that sits inside happiness, for you can’t know one without the other – but also a coherent package. “Your Love Takes Me Higher” is one of the glorious lost singles of 1989, a euphoric pop rush equal to anyting Motown ever issued. (And the attendant remixes spread over various 12” singles are equal in creating a vinyl rush).

Even the normal album cuts that were clearly never going to be singles – “Don’t You Worry”, “Scarlet Beautiful”, and so on – are superior to most of their contemporaries best work. Sure, you can keep your Happy Mondays and your Stone Roses, because to me, this album wipes the floor with the lot of them.

The second half of the album opens with the classic “The Sun Rising” – the bands signature song in many ways – and you would have thought this song would reappear plentifully in the bonus tracks. Of the bonus material, there’s a remix of it created for a Radio Session that is a fun reinterpretation of the song.

The final song – “Found” – is for me one of the finest love songs ever written.

The bonus CD is almost exclusively unreleased material – there are four previously unreleased songs in “Jackie”, “Sally”, “My Heart’s Desire” and “Jennifer Smiles” – all of which are far beyond expectations. There’s three b-sides – “Acid Love”, “Paradise” and “Pablo” - as well as 6 demo versions which are fascinating insights into the creative process and show how fully formed and realised the bands vision has been from the off. They’re all well worth disc space. The whole project is sympathetically remastered and the artwork represented appropriately.

Perhaps the only criticism I can make is that – for a band that delved so deeply into remix culture and produced a plethora of excellent alternative remixes – that that is so under-represented here ; particularly some of the great remixes (such as the stonking “Eurovisionary” mix of The Sun Rising) that have been locked into deleted 12” and CD singles for 30 years and only reissued digitally, are sadly absent despite ample space at the end of the album itself. Bookend, non-album singles “The Loving Feeling”, and “It’s Alright Now” are also not represented here, though are easily available online. And there is the remix album “Blissed Out” which covers most bases anyway.

So overall, “Happiness” represents for me a long overdue reissue and reappraisal of an important, formative album which has long been overlooked by many, and for me, was a beacon of hope in my youth. Happiness it is, and happiness remains.