Kraftwerk cassettes

ELECTRIC CAFE (France, 1986) EMI 264 24 0644 4 XDR Today is another fairly easy-to-find cassette; a French variant of Electric Cafe. Only small details set it apart from the BeNeLux edition I featured ages ago, but I suppose in a sense this whole blog is about minutiae... The one detail this French edition shares with the BeNeLux one, setting them apart from most other versions, is on the front of the J-card, where the lower left corner has "English Version" written in a small box. As mentioned earlier, it would be fairly pointless to print this on the front in territories where you couldn't get the "Deutsche Version", but otoh I frankly doubt the German edition was widely distributed in France; for my money, the French edition simply got its cover design template from the Holland one. The J-card is the full 4-panel thing, printed on both sides. The cassette is cream coloured with a brownish on-body print.

THE MAN·MACHINE (The Netherlands, RE 198?) EMI/ Capitol 1A 238 15 7597 4 Following up on a recent post here, today it's another Netherlands/ Europe reissue of The Man·Machine! So. As I said in the previous post, most reissues from the mid-80's onward were "Made in Holland" for export to a few other markets within the EU (or EC, depending). I'm not exactly sure where other than the Netherlands you could go in a shop and buy this, but the UK, Italy, France and Spain all had reissues of their own, so maybe Germany and BeNeLux? I think I saw these Holland cassettes in shops in Scandinavia too back in the mid-to-late 80s.   This is released on the FAME sub-label. It comes with a simple one panel J-card in thin glossy paper, printed on both sides. As evident from the photo, this one has XDR logos on the card front and both sides of the cassette itself. The FAME mid-price series had a standard design palate, placing the LP design in the lower part of the front of the J

NON STOP (Poland, 1991?) Basston B-149 Back to my recent mass of Polish pirate cassettes, and today we're back to the more puzzling end of the scale: "Non Stop".  The cassette shares it's title with a live bootleg, and if I'm honest I was hoping this might be a pirate cassette of a bootleg CD... But listening, it's actually half the tracks of The Mix, an album we've seen in lots of variants here before . But even though these Polish cassettes often disregard the original design, at least they will usually keep the title! On the other hand, of course it's a practical way to make your product stand out; loads of different Polish labels put out The Mix, so if there's just one "Non Stop", maybe that will help sales? Again, like many Polish The Mix cassettes, they leave out a lot of tracks from the official, 65-minute double LP. More surprising, the sides of this cassette is of uneven length; Side A clocks in at 17 minutes, while the b-side

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (UK, 1977) Capitol TC-E-ST 11603 - 0C-262 82 353 An interim-post this time, a short message to present another UK edition of Trans-Europe Express. Nice to have some of these variants I keep mentioning! I had a nearly identical edition on the blog back in October 2023 - the difference is simply that the tracklist is printed on the actual shell of this one, whereas the other just has "See inlay for details" on both sides. The J-cards are the same; full-sized two-panel J-card, on glossy card stock, printed on both sides. Again, the tracks are jumbled around; Showroom Dummies and Franz Schubert are switched, in order to make the programmes more equal of length. Later cassettes had the correct track order.

AUTOBAHN (USA, 1975) Vertigo VCR4-2003 0795 Here's the first US edition of Autobahn, the Vertigo edition from 1975. As seen before , the US put out several different editions of Autobahn on cassette, on many record companies, and a couple of them came in variants as well - including this version. This one has yellow paper labels, but there's another version on Vertigo without labels; just the same grey shell with black on-body print. The label design is the same though, and notably Hütter and Schneider are credited differently on each label: The A-side claims that "All selections written by R. Hutter and F. Schneider" - well, Emil Schult helped enough with the lyrics to get credited for them on other editions - while on the B-side, they are credited for "Music, Concept & Production". In fact, these credits are repeated on the backflap of the J-card, along with the track list.   The  J-card was only slightly updated for the 1977 reissue, so there may be

RADIO-ACTIVITY (UK, 1987) Capitol/ EMI, TC-EMS 1256 - 18 2087 4 Back to the United Kingdom today for another reissue of Radio-Activity - the 1987 edition, which I think is the last one they issued. I've posted two UK editions before: The first UK issue, which had a brown stripe across the top of the J-card, and the 1982 reissue , which was far prettier. There's also one with a FAME logo on the front, I suppose there are variants of that too, and then there's this. The year of release, or so I believe, is printed in the bottom right corner of the second panel on the J-card - "8708 MWE" corresponds with "7610 DP" or "8201 DP" on the two earlier editions I've posted here. Anyway, like both the earlier ones, this too comes in a good sturdy 2-panel J-card, printed on both sides. Where the 1982 reissue gave more credits than the original, on this, bizarrely, Emil Schult's credit for artwork is no longer present... The cassette is clear wit