THE MAN·MACHINE (Italy, 1978?)
Unofficial - no label, no cat.no.

I've posted the official Italian The Man·Machine cassette before, but Italy also had a flourishing un-official music industry in the 1970s... So here's one example of a bootleg copy from Italy.

There were many different editions, and I suppose this pirate industry enabled some cottage industry-type limited editions, so of course they keep turning up, and no-one can tell how many copies there were made, or exactly when. I have two different Italian editions with no record company logos, or S.I.A.E stamps (more about those here), this is the lesser-known one. It's funny too - the front cover is a replication of the official album, but the Dolby logo from the official cassette is simply crossed out with a big black box - in fact, blacker than the background colour used on the rest of the front cover. A rare case of honesty among the pirates - I expect the cassette is not recorded with Dolby then? Thanks for sparing us the disappointment, sort of.

What we do get though, is a slightly amended sleeve compared to the original - the spine is green, for whatever reason, and the backflap, in a bright yellow, carries the songwriting credits. The second panel seems to be lifted from the official cassette, except the credit to Kraftwerk as producers and, bizarrely, the "Made in Italy" credit, has been removed. 

The cassette is grey, with white labels which look just incredibly home-made. Lovely!






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