THE MAN·MACHINE/ TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (New Zealand, 1987?)
Capitol TCTP5

A fascinating item today - two cassettes in an outsize box. These were released in New Zealand. Apparently EMI Australasia issued a whole series of these, entitled "EMI TWIN PACK CASSETTES", in 1986 and 1987. Generally featuring major artists' double greatest hits sets, the series included people like The Hollies, Cliff Richard, Queen, Frank Zappa, The Stranglers, and Whitesnake; but with Kraftwerk, there were no "The 40 Greatest Hits" or similar collection, so they simply put out two of their best-loved albums side by side.

The box is large and flat, housing the two cassettes next to each other. Therefore, the J-card is roughly double the size of a normal one, although that may be hard to spot on my crappy jpegs... Anyway,  the front has an image from the inner sleeve to The Man Machine, and the J-card is 2-panel, printed only on one side. Not much in the way of liner notes or legal info here, apart from a notice on the back flap that the package contains the two previously-released albums mentioned on the front.

There are a lot of surprising variants for this release. From the background colour changing from the logical red to brown or purple, a reissue stacked the cassettes on top of each other rather than next to each other (ie. so the front of the jewel case is standard size). Not only are the variants of this release issued with different catalogue numbers, the one I have here seems to have been issued on Capitol, but is only "distributed" by EMI... This seems odd for a cassette in the "EMI TWIN PACK" series!

Cassettes are transparent brown, while labels are white with red and black print.









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