RALF & FLORIAN (1976, France)
Philips 7105 147

 

In celebration of my 50th post on this blog, a raritity.

Ralf & Florian was released in many more editions after Autobahn was a hit, and through the latter half of the seventies, many reissues were put out internationally. Especially, I'll wish good luck to anyone trying to get every LP variant from the US of this, they seem to still be discovered. Cassettes seem to be a far simpler story, with one edition per country - if even that. So far I've come across five different editions, this one, which came out in France in 1976, is apparently the rarest of them.


For the record, the ones I know about are the original German version, which was out in 1973, then in 1975, it was issued on cassette in the US and Australia; France in 1976 and finally, Spain in 1979. None of these show up very often, I suppose, but this wasn't even listed in Discogs until 2022, and was largely unknown outside of die-hard collector circuits.


These cassette editions have each a slightly different take on the original, German LP design. The French cassette presents the original LP cover as a dark facsimile, with a grey box for the band logo and album title, above the band photo. It's a slightly dreary approach, I think, the black and white image and a grey box above it. Possibly it was simply how the image was sent to the French label office? The J-card is a 2-panel effort, on glossy paper. Printed on both sides, we get the credits, including the "musicomix" that was inserted into the LP, but of which no trace was found wit the cassette edition... Oh well! At least, it means Emil Schult gets a name-check.


Labels are the standard green Philips effort, at least I think it was standard for France in the mid-70's, the same design was used on the other early Kraftwerk cassettes including Autobahn.










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
RADIO-ACTIVITY (Portugal, 1976) Capitol 11C274 82 087 Every blog should have a certain amount of posts starting with "I haven't been posting in a while", for the benefit I suppose for readers who do not posess a calendar. It's summer, I was busy and I haven't received a lot of items recently to fascinate me. But sure, here's an item, a nice return to Portugal and to Radio-Activity!   I love these Portuguese items , they have their own style! At least during the "Capitol years", ie the albums Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express and The Man-Machine, each cassette came out in several slightly different editions. Each one presents the LP cover quite simply, except where Portugal gives us a coloured stripe across the upper front of the J-card. Bright, clear colours, and whenever one edition sold out, they changed the stripe. Hence I've seen red, yellow and blue editions of The Man-Machine, and at least a red and this blue one of Radio-Activity (if y...
Read more
Image
AUTOBAHN (Poland, 1996?) Unofficial Reggae, 90208 Although there has been a lot of Polish releases on this blog before, I can't remember even one Autobahn? Well, here's the first, then, and it's on the surprisingly titled "Reggae" label. Apparently based on the German 1985 edition , same front illustration at least. The cassette is clear, without any info, not even which side you're looking at. The cover is a simple 1-panel J-card, on fairly cheap-looking thin paper, and printed on one side only. In fact, the only actual connection to the official item is the "motorway sign" design on the front; they haven't even bothered to put the track list on the cover! It just says "Autobahn I-V", which surprises me, as if they had access to the illustration on the front, surely they had the tracklist too? Maybe they were sent a postcard of it. I stated above that this came out in 1996, I base this on a stamp inside the cover. However it's bar...
Read more
Image
The Model (Poland, 199?) Unofficial Euro Star ES 2213 Time for another Polish pirate cassette! This time, though, a compilation, one of the few that weren't "curated", so to speak, in Poland...  "The Model 1975-1978" was a compilation on the US Cleopatra label, released in 1992. It features tracks from Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express and The Man Machine, some of them in their original single edits, and Les Mannequins which had been issued as the b-side to its English-language counterpart Showroom Dummies on a promotional "disco" 12" single. There are several Polish editions of this, this one has all the tracks from the compilation - not in the same order, though, they have been jumbled around, I suppose it was an effort to make two programmes of equal lenght. Apart from starting the cassette with the title track, which is not unjustified for a best-of compilation with a title track, they somewhat surprisingly placed Trans-Europe Express on Si...
Read more