Kraftwerk cassettes

THE MAN·MACHINE (Italy, 1978?) Unofficial - no label, cat.no S.R. 3003 Now here's an oddity... Another unofficial copy of "The Man·Machine" from Italy.    I've posted one before, quite similar, and I know of others too - in fact, every now and then a new variant turns up. In this case, I had to take a closer look at a cassette I already own, but this one turns out to be just very similar. With the Italian "underground market" - ie. that of unofficial knock-off product - I fail to understand why they'd make so many different designs; wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just copy something one-to-one? Did the pirate industry cater for collectors like me, who wanted the same cassette in different covers? Surely not... So why then bother to have their own design for each run of bootleg? It's strange.  Whatever the reasoning behind it though, here is another green themed design, with both the top of the front and the spine bright green. The spine h...

COMPUTER WORLD (Italy, 198?) Unofficial release Stereo Teen 355321 I haven't posted any Computer World cassettes in over one year, so it's about time! A recent purchase, this is an unofficial Italian edition of Computer World! This one may be from around the same time as the official edition , it has a strangely home-made appearance - labels glued "in the vicinity" of where they should be, and on the J-card a lot of fine lines, where you can clearly make out that they've assembled the cover from many little cut-and-pasted pieces... The front cover image is kind of a close-up, compared to the LP design, with the colours "inverted" - ie the background is black, while the computer (ok, the "terminal", then!) is dyed a greyish yellow. Although it's dark, you can still clearly make out the four silhouettes on the screen. The surroundings seem to be standard for this unofficial and beautifully named label, with the band name and album title in la...

COMPUTER WORLD (Italy, 1981) EMI 3C 264 64370 Haven't had an Italian one in a while, so let me present this early Italian edition of Computer World! We've seen the reissue of course, in a previous post. That had a different take on the design, while here we see a more conventional approach - the whole front in yellow, with the grey terminal showing the four silhouettes of Kraftwerk, and the band name and album title above. Note that Italy went for hi-viz here, the album title is printed in larger letters than most other territories, similar in size to the German original. The cassette comes packed in a 2-panel J-card, printed on one side, and stamped on the spine as I think was the rule in Italy at the time. Speaking of spines, this one is blue, as on most Italian cassettes - whether it's an EMI standard, or an Italian standard or what, I can not say, but have a look round the blog for other Italian examples. The cassette is off-white with black on-body print. Very nice! ...

THE MAN·MACHINE (Italy, RE 1987?) Capitol 54 1854444 Welcome back! Today it's the Italian late 80s re-edition of The Man·Machine! One of those reissues which have "reissue specific" design features... Well, at least it's something to make it stand out, there's no denying this one looks different to most other releases! Italy had a reissue series in the late 80's, putting out at least three of the albums; this, Trans-Europe Express and Computer World ( Autobahn had been reissued in 1985, and Radio-Activity a few years before, so possibly these were continued? Or they still had some left in 1987, and didn't feel the need for another edition?). Discogs has this release listed as part of a "Talent" reissue series, but I can't find any allusions to it on the release in question - the word is not mentioned on shell or j-card. Maybe there should have been a sticker or something, maybe it was known in Italy, like "Nice Price" or "...

RADIO-ACTIVITY (Italy, 1983?) Capitol 54 1820874 An Italian reissue here, we haven't been to Italy in ages... I have a feeling this came in 1983, because that's when the LP with similar catalogue number was out (according to www.discogs.com).   The reissue - ie the one with the "54" cat.no, which replaced the earlier edition with the cat.no starting with 3C - came in a couple of variants. This one has a white cassette shell with black on-body print. There's also another with a clear shell. The J-card is 2-panel, printed on one side on sturdy glossy card, while the clear-shell copy I know of, has a 1-panel J-card, with the same print, just spread to both sides of the card. In 1987, Italy had a reissue series with a different style of front design, but I have no indications that Radio-Activity was part of that? (if you know anything about it, please let me know!)   Typical to Italy, the spine of the J-card has a stamp with the letters S.I.A.E, indicating that the...

KRAFTWERK 2 (Italy, 1977) Fontana, 7299 776 Following on from yesterdays post , of course I couldn't post "1" and not follow up with "2"! The two make up a set of the first four Kraftwerk albums, in edited versions - On the first, tracks from Kraftwerk's debut are coupled with songs off the third album, while on this, we get the tracks off the second album and their break-through, Autobahn. The A-side has the main portion of early highlight "Kling Klang" - pretty much the first 9 minutes. Then, we get some of Kraftwerk's most pointless work, "Atem" - three minutes of what sounds like heavy breathing - and Strom, which opens with a minute of someone's first rehearsal on electric guitar. In both cases, the songs are unaltered and not edited. The next track, Spule 4, is an ambient bass guitar jam, where it has been decided that around 90 seconds will suffice. I don't disagree. Wellenlänge is also cut down to under two minutes, an...

KRAFTWERK 1 (Italy, 1977) Fontana, 7299 775 Most of the time, the casettes available on the second hand market are in pretty good condition. Occasionally, some optimistic dealer will try to get sold an item without cover, often listing the item at a higher price than the complete item normally sells for, but rarely have I seen a more battered copy of any cassette in my posession than todays item! It's pretty rare though so until I find a NM version I'm quite happy to own this! So here's an Italian cassette called "Kraftwerk 1". We've had a couple of compilations of early works before , and as I've said, there were a good range of different ones issued in various places in the wake of Kraftwerk's international successes (Autobahn, Radio-Activity was a hit in France, and the 1981 UK tour generated some interest and one more comp...). These compilations have been both an interesting addition to a completist's collection, for their track selection, ...

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS (Italy, 1977) Capitol 3C 264 85110 Italy is an interesting country as Kraftwerk cassettes go, with many releases and variants. Today's post is a kind of follow-up on an earlier post ; two cassettes that look quite similar, but have different catalogue numbers! So, as mentioned in that previous post, this album has been released across many territories with different cat.no's - Sometimes, variants ending with 82306, or 85110. 3C is the country code for Italy (France is 2C, Spain 10C, Brazil 31C etc), and at least the 2 in 264 indicates the cassette format (the corresponding LP has 3C 064 85110, so with just the one cipher to distinguish, it stands to reason that's what the cipher means). Apart from the catalogue numbers, there is not a lot of difference between this and the previous post. They each come with a 2-panel J-card, printed on one side only. Both cassettes have a blue shell. The cover design is the same, based on the black and white LP sleeve ...

Computer World (Italy, 1989) EMI 54 1643704 Something different today: An Italian reissue of Computer World. This came out in the late 1980s, apparently after Capitol sold the rights, because the Capitol logo from earlier editions is gone. Publishing is credited to Kling Klang Musik, and the phonographic copyright is credited to Golden Cloud - which I believe was a UK company, so maybe the copyright was licenced via the UK?  Anyway, rather than amend the original design to correspond with the then-current rights holders, they've gone down an entirely different route this time: The original LP cover is reproduced in the top right corner, a large white stripe across the middle has the band name, and then the album title and full track list is below that stripe. At least three Kraftwerk albums came out in Italy in the late 80s with similar design - we've seen one of them, Trans-Europe Express , before, and The Man Machine has pink background colour (I'm sure I will post that o...

THE MAN·MACHINE (Italy, 1978?) Unofficial - no label, no cat.no. I've posted the official Italian The Man·Machine cassette before, but Italy also had a flourishing un-official music industry in the 1970s... So here's one example of a bootleg copy from Italy. There were many different editions, and I suppose this pirate industry enabled some cottage industry-type limited editions, so of course they keep turning up, and no-one can tell how many copies there were made, or exactly when. I have two different Italian editions with no record company logos, or S.I.A.E stamps (more about those here ), this is the lesser-known one. It's funny too - the front cover is a replication of the official album, but the Dolby logo from the official cassette is simply crossed out with a big black box - in fact, blacker than the background colour used on the rest of the front cover. A rare case of honesty among the pirates - I expect the cassette is not recorded with Dolby then? Thanks for spa...

AUTOBAHN (Italy, 1985) EMI/ Parlophone  64 2400704 The Italian reissue of Autobahn doesn't turn up too often, and in spite of the fairly modest appearance, it fetches some good prices these days... It is clearly based on the UK 1985 version , with only minor changes to the J-card compared to the UK one; There is no barcode, and an EMI logo is added to the spine. Saving Lira where they could, the Italian label also chose to go for a simple 1-panel J-card, where the UK one had a fold-out, and also, the Italian has slightly thinner paper.  As so often happens when people who don't speak German transcribe German text, there's a printer's error in that Emil Schult's name got an extra Z - Schultz, but the famous misspelling of Morgenspaziergang has at least not turned up here... No actual documentation on the release year either, it only says 1974, but I'm going to risk it anyway, the reissue of Autobahn came in 1985 in most places so I suppose, also in Italy. The cas...

RADIO-ACTIVITY (Italy, 1976)  Capitol 3C 264 82087 An early Italian edition here, possibly the first one... the blue edition of Radio-Activity. In Italy (and many other countries), the follow-up to Autobahn was not released before 1976, when it came out on LP and cassette. Possibly it didn't really take off internationally until the title track was used as theme tune for a music show on French radio, making it a hit there.   As usual in Italy, there exists a couple of different versions. This, as mentioned, is blue, and I've seen another edition with the same cat.no - and identical J-card - with a white or light grey cassette. A later edition, with cat.no's beginning in 54 appeared later, 1983 or so. With a slow but steady seller as this, I'm a little surprised that only two variants have popped up from the first seven years after it was released... In addition to the blue cassette with white on-body print, the cassette was released with a blue shell. Since the spine an...