TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (Belgium, 1977)
Capitol 4C 258 82306

 
Rolling out the big guns, here's a very rare European edition that I recently had the luck of adding to my collection!

Belgium is of course a small country in between France, Germany and the Netherlands (ok, and Luxemburg, sorry!), and I don't suppose the cassette market was screaming for local output, what with these other countries often being within bicycling distance... At any rate, not many Kraftwerk albums came on cassette in Belgian editions - I know of 2 - and you don't see them up for sale very often.


I've mentioned before how the German and US editions (on LP as well as cassette) would use different cover designs; furthermore, some countries had their own ideas... Belgium went for a pretty unique approach, basing their design on the German LP _back_ cover! The J. Stara idol portrait in black and white, with Hütter to the left and Flür far right, and the song titles above the image, in black against a white background. It all looks surprisingly similar to the back cover of the German LP - except the titles are translated; most to English, but we get the French translation of Schaufensterpuppen, so that title is obviously in French.


The J-card is 2-panel, printed on glossy paper. The labels are white with red print. A surprising detail is the Capitol logo, which has what I suppose must have been a Copyright mark or Registered trademark logo (© or Ⓡ), but which has become simply a circular smudge below the L in "Capitol", so it looks like it says "Capito!"... This effect is repeated on both labels AND the spine of the J-card. Now unsee that!






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