Kraftwerk cassettes

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 t...

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (Belgium, 1977) Capitol 4C 258 82306   Rolling out the big guns, here's a very rare European edition that I recently had the luck of adding to my collection! Belgium is of course a small country in between France, Germany and the Netherlands (ok, and Luxemburg, sorry!), and I don't suppose the cassette market was screaming for local output, what with these other countries often being within bicycling distance... At any rate, not many Kraftwerk albums came on cassette in Belgian editions - I know of 2 - and you don't see them up for sale very often. I've mentioned before how the German and US editions (on LP as well as cassette) would use different cover designs; furthermore, some countries had their own ideas... Belgium went for a pretty unique approach, basing their design on the German LP _back_ cover! The J. Stara idol portrait in black and white, with Hütter to the left and Flür far right, and the song titles above the image, in black against a...