TRANS EUROPA EXPRESS (Germany, 1985)
EMI ELECTROLA 1C 264-82 306


German cassettes are important, if you want to collect Kraftwerk cassettes; as seen in many previous posts on this blog, Kraftwerk took the design seriously and went beyond the usual LP facsimiles of the era, and of course, starting from this release, the songs were translated to English on the international releases. So to hear the songs sung in their original German, the domestic release is paramount (with a couple of notable exceptions of course!).


Germany being Germany, I kind of expected it to be a fairly simple task, too - ordnung muss sein, right?10 albums, maybe budget reissues of the biggest sellers, and a compilation or two? Of course it turns out there are some variants of most releases, here as anywhere. Here for instance is a mid-80s reissue, in a replica of the original sleeve - and on the cassette itself, "Made in EEC".


The 1977 edition had a 2-panel J-card, to make room for a panel of other releases on EMI. These other releases I suppose were doomed to oblivion by the time of this issue, and instead we get a simple 1-panel card. The front has the catalogue number bottom left, and a "Dolby System" logo bottom right - again, the Dolby logo was not on the first issue and the cat.no was centred. The cassette has a clear shell with white on-body print. Year of re-release is not printed, either; I know I said 1985 but that's simply a guess. Don't believe everything you read on the internet!










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