RADIO-ACTIVITY (Greece, 1985)
Capitol/ EMI, 262-82087


Another first on this blog - I don't think I've ever had anything from Greece before? Here's a 1985 reissue of Radio-Activity, which has turned up quite recently.


It has maintained that '70s look, or at least, the design is very simple - where some territories amended the original LP design, here, we simply get the facsimile treatment. Ie, the square album design placed in the middle of the front panel, with band name and album title above. Can't have taken ten minutes to design this. The J-card is a 2-panel effort, printed on one side, and the cassette itself is grey with blue print, without labels.  (I never really understood the need for sticking paper labels on plastic cassettes anyway, they tend to fall off or skewer or curl up something horribly, and if one end came loose, the labels could be mangled up by your car stereo, so it's much easier to find decent-looking used copies of those cassettes that didn't have them.) For once, there is clear evidence of release year: 1985 is printed on both J-card and the cassette itself. If there was an earlier cassette release of this issued in Greece, I have yet to come across one.


I bought this not long ago, and it was still sealed when I got it, with a small sash along the lower part of the cover. This has some information in Greek, and the letters I.F.P.I. - which stands for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. I suppose, although this is mere guesswork on my part, that there is info here about the copyright, maybe something like you can't copy it to other cassettes, or simply a statement that the product is official and legal? Nice though.
 

I regret slightly that I didn't keep the item sealed when I got it. Well, but I needed to look inside!







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
ELECTRIC CAFE (Australia, 1986) EMI TCEMD1001 Back to Australia, and one I've been looking for without much luck, the Straya edition of Electric Cafe! On a personal note, I ordered a copy of this during the pandemic, but it has yet to materialise... A rare occasion of things getting lost in the mail for me. Hope it's not going to happen more often in the future! For me as a collector, with many different editions of each release, the ones that look a bit different are often the ones I find the most interesting - even when they don't look that fascinating per se. I've shown a few editions of this release from countries that didn't splash out on the full , 2-sided/ 4-panel J-card, some countries made a relatively "budget" release on cassette... Australia did an interesting variant, where they steered clear of the all-black custom design, but at least, the J-card was printed on both sides. And the inside is simply an image, the one which was on the inner cove
Read more
Image
Kraftwerk (Poland, 199?) Unofficial TomZo 0090 The Polish takeover continues with another pirate cassette, today it's a compilation! Well, kind of.   I've touched before on the anything-goes attitude, typical in Poland in the late 80s and through the 90s. Today's item is a brilliant case in point; nearly a two-for-one, it has most of the The Man-Machine album on side one, and most of the Computerwelt album on side two. Yes, one in English, the other in German! 'Neon Lights' is omitted from the first, while Computerwelt is presented here without 'Taschenrechner' _and_ 'Nummern'. All three are key tracks, although I suppose nearly every track is key on these two releases... It's especially baffling that 'Nummern' is not included, since it's sort of a medley with the next song, 'Computerwelt 2', so this one starts rather abruptly after the ending of it's counterpart. In fact, the cassette is a c60, so it wasn't even neces
Read more
Image
RADIO-ACTIVITY (Canada, 1986?) Capitol, 4N-16380 Another Canadian issue, another sound improvement scheme; this time, the Dolby HX Pro... The system works, in short; it's a system to ensure less distortion, even at high input - which again means you can record the cassettes at a louder volume, thereby making the music rise out of the hiss and bob's yer uncle. A good idea around the advent of the CD, I suppose? For me though, a better selling point of the Canadian cassette reissue is the cover design; the album cover is presented against a grey background, with the band name and album title repeated in blue. It's both a quite stylish effect, and a welcome change from other international editions, where - if they didn't amend the LP cover to make it fit the cassette front, the background would simply be white, or at a push, black. (It's a bit sad that no other country based their cover design on the German cassette !) So. Being a mid-80s reissue from Canada, it's
Read more