THE MAN·MACHINE (Spain, 1978)
Capitol 10C 246 85444

A Spanish cassette edition of The Man·Machine today, sometimes I get new items in, and immediately write about them, but here's one I've had for years... It's a nice item, too, like so many Spanish cassettes!

Famously, Spanish pressings of most if not all Kraftwerk releases from the 1970's had the titles translated to Spanish. In this case, the international artwork is pictured on the front, with it's English title as usual, but printed above it is the legend "El Hombre Maquina". For some reason, this sparked a lengthy musing on my part about whether "Hombre" translates as "Human being" in the same way as "Man" does in English; after all, the German title uses "Mensch", not "Mann", and, well - but realising we need not go into this, I'll just crack on.

The Spanish market is ripe with variants and interesting items, and - well, at least until recently, you could find most of them comparably cheap. For The Man·Machine, there are a few different coloured shells, most with on-body print, but this one is white and has yellow paper labels. The more I repeat my theory (to wit, that the paper label ones are first editions, and the on-body printed ones are reissues), the more I like it, but it's still only a theory I suppose. 

The J-card is a 1-panel affair, with print on both sides, and the card used is a bit rough, not the whitest of white.