ELECTRIC CAFE (1986, India)
EMI (STCS EMD 1001)


A recent acquisition, a rare item and a bit of an anomaly - India has of course a large and varied selection of obscure cassettes, and unless you're in India, I suppose most will be hard to come by. Many of the Kraftwerk cassettes from India had slight variations in design, and Electric Cafe is no exception - for this, a simple repro of the European sleeve would have looked nice enough, but they opted for the LP cover, and amended it their own way...

The album image is placed slightly lower than the middle of the front of the J-card, with black background above and below. The band name and album title are repeated in white near the top, together with logos for Dolby and EMI, while the lower section has a bold claim: "Beware! Pirated cassettes damage your equipment. Buy only genuine EMI cassettes". I have no information in support of this, although I must confess to know less than I would like to about Indian pirate cassettes... Pirated cassettes are known to do some damage to the income of those who earn on official product of course, including the artists. I wonder if this sort of unsubstantiated claim isn't actually outlawed in Europe? (And btw, if I'm perfectly honest, I doubt I'll play even this official EMI release anyway, but that is a different matter entirely).

Unfortunately for this blog, and I suppose for myself as a collector, my copy of this cassette has been vandalised, the stern message all crossed out with felt tip. I only noticed this scrutinising the item, it wasn't possible to see from pictures, but I suppose if you zoom in on the pictures here presented, you may be able to make out a few letters? One day I will find a way to clean away the felt tip and my item will shine through! 

The J-card is 1-panel, printed on both sides of quite thin paper. Grey cassette shell has on-body print, fairly standard for cassettes from this country.







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