V/A - Super Group Festival (Germany, 1974)
Philips 69 978

Another Various artists compilation today, and again I feel it's justified by the Kraftwerk content - I trust this item should be interesting to even the most discerning Kraftwerk cassette enthusiast!


As we know, Kraftwerk released precious little music that wasn't on their albums; their singles would generally an album track on each side, and they didn't contribute exclusive tracks to film soundtracks or compilation albums. 11 albums, some with language variations (5 albums in both German and English, two songs in French, two in Spanish and one in Japanese). Tour De France is a non-album single, or at least it was for 20 years - until they re-recorded it and used it to flesh out the 2003 album Tour De France Soundtracks. 


So the only Kraftwerk recording that isn't on any of their albums is the early version of Kometenmelodie. Released as "Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie", this was a 1973 single, with one fast version and a slow one, much like on the Autobahn LP, but recorded with earlier equipment and slightly less produced... These versions were nearly exclusive to the single; a 1977 Italian compilation has the A-side version and the B-side... is here. Version 2 is the slower version, and in fact the single fades a little earlier than this compilation - I think the track is around 20 seconds longer here.


The Super Group Festival LP was released in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 1974 (AFAIK only Germany put it out on cassette though), and features some big names of 1974's rock elite; Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Status Quo, Nazareth and Genesis. Each band has 2-3 tracks, and with Kraftwerk, we get the first half of Ruckzuck, the German single mix of Autobahn and Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie 2. It's quite startling to hear Ruckzuck fade out after 3:15 to make way for "Break the Rules" by Status Quo...


The J-card is a long 3-panel affair, with colour print on the outside and a little additional info in b/w on the inside. Cassettes are grey, while the labels are a lovely dark green.








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