TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (UK, 1977)
Capitol TC-E-ST 11603 - 0C-262 82353


We will now have a short break in this barrage of Polish pirate tapes in order to present this, the UK edition of Trans-Europe Express. Not exactly what you'd call a monster rarity, but a nice item, pretty to look at, and very official, so here we go!


The cover is a full-sized two-panel J-card, on glossy card stock, printed on both sides - but the inside is just a bit of legal notices and such. As pointed out before on this blog, the UK, US, and a few other territories used the J. Stara colour collage for the front cover, whereas many european territories including Germany, Italy and Spain would use the Maurice Seymour photograph. The UK got the colour a bit wrong, it's over-saturated and looks orange tinted, but they liked the design enough to keep it for their later Fame label reissue. 


The cassette came in many variants, both originally and the Fame reprints; most shells are grey, although an early 80s version was yellow, and the grey ones had blue, red or black on-body print, some showing the track lists, others just referring us to the inlay card "for details". The ones with blue print on grey shell - of which I am aware of two variants, both with tracklist and without - came with the same J-card, with an amended tracklist; Showroom Dummies and Franz Schubert are switched, in order to make the programmes more equal of length. I suspect this was deemed unacceptable as "Endless Endless" is really just a vocoder over the arpeggio from Franz Schubert; it sounds weird to have them cut from each other, and later cassettes had the correct track order.








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