THE MAN·MACHINE (Belgium, 1978)
EMI/ Capitol 4C 256 85444

I was really happy to get this cassette - the Belgian edition! It's both quite rare from a collector's perspective, and of course it has its own solution to the problem of designing a rectangular front cover.

Of course, there are many different versions of The Man·Machine on cassette, and while the original, iconic LP cover was pretty quadratic, if you print this on the front of a cassette cover, you get a lot of empty space on the top and/or bottom of the front panel. (I can only remember one country cropping the image to make it fit: Germany) Some countries would fill this space with band name, album title, track list, and/or logos from the various record companies, or add background colour; Belgium actually took some design from the back cover of the LP, and pasted it across the top of the panel! They took the whole top left corner of the LP, with the band name and album title, and a black and white background. On the LP, the word "Machine" is repeated, like in the lyrics to the title track. I love that they keep the red and black colour, but disregard completely the original intention for the red "M", ie that the "Machine"s from the LP cover each have a different letter printed in red, spelling out a red "Machine" within them - totalling up the repetitions from the title track. Nothing of the sort happens here, just one album title, with "THE M"... in red and ..."AN·MACHINE" in black... Still, it looks rather striking!

The J-card is 1 panel, printed on thick glossy paper, and the cassette is grey with white paper labels. The Capitol logo seems to have a small black dot in the bottom right corner, possibly a copyright residue or some such, but it makes the logo look like it says "Capito!" instead of "Capitol"... Again, exactly the sort of small discrepancies that makes it fun to be a collector. What a great item!






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