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...

THE MIX (Poland, 1991?) SuperTape ST 632 Oh, come on. It's been ages since I had any Polish pirate cassettes up, surely one more can't hurt! Poland has had such a _mass_ of different cassettes, especially of The Mix, which I've shown in loads of different editions here before . Most of them will have tampered with the tracklist somehow - again I'm at the risk of repeating myself - as the original album is 65 minutes long and the normal cassette length is either 46 or 60 minutes. Simpler and cheaper to use a shorter cassette and skip one track on the CD. The track they left out, however, is slightly surprising: The last track of the album, and the highlight of the 1991 tour (and of many tours since) - Music Non Stop. They haven't left the rest of the tracks in their correct place, either - Pocket Calculator and Dentaku are on different sides of the cassette, bringing a medley to a confusing end, and worse still - Abzug is on its own in the middle of side B, while ...

RADIO-ACTIVITY (Spain, 1976?) Unofficial Crown (no cat.no.) And we're back, with another unofficial item. It's been a quiet autumn for my cassette collection, I don't find much new to add, and what I do receive is generally pirate stuff. When I started collecting, I wasn't really that interested in the unofficial side of things... That said, I was glad to receive this Spanish boot of Radio-Activity!   I haven't posted any Spanish pirate cassettes before, simply because I didn't have any. Furthermore, this is my first unofficial cassette of Radio-Activity! For some reason, even the Polish pirate market seems to have given Radio-Activity the miss, Discogs has ONE Polish boot of this album listed. Compare that with other albums like The Mix or The Man Machine... As Spanish pirate cassettes go, Discogs has only one entry? Which is another Radio-Activity - ie, no Autobahn, no The Mix, nothing else in between. I suspect we're treading unchartered territories here,...

AUTOBAHN (Poland, 1996?) Unofficial Reggae, 90208 Although there has been a lot of Polish releases on this blog before, I can't remember even one Autobahn? Well, here's the first, then, and it's on the surprisingly titled "Reggae" label. Apparently based on the German 1985 edition , same front illustration at least. The cassette is clear, without any info, not even which side you're looking at. The cover is a simple 1-panel J-card, on fairly cheap-looking thin paper, and printed on one side only. In fact, the only actual connection to the official item is the "motorway sign" design on the front; they haven't even bothered to put the track list on the cover! It just says "Autobahn I-V", which surprises me, as if they had access to the illustration on the front, surely they had the tracklist too? Maybe they were sent a postcard of it. I stated above that this came out in 1996, I base this on a stamp inside the cover. However it's bar...

ELECTRIC CAFE (Romania, 19?) Unofficial Poker 443 Another pirate edition today, but this time it's a country that hasn't featured here before: Romania! Here's a Romanian cassette of Electric Cafe. Admittedly it looks a lot like a similar release from Poland; I'm not sure whether Poker Sound was an actual label, with a Romanian office or - if this is a "bootleg of a bootleg"... Apart from the country of origin, today's cassette is fairly straightforward - the J-card has the LP design centre front, against a blue background, and band name and album title in coloured boxes over and under the image. There is a Polish edition of this, and the J-card for that looks exactly the same as this. The J-card is on glossy, thin paper, printed on one side, but with a stamp on the white inside (the significance of which is sadly lost on me). The track list both on the back-flap and the second panel is amended to make the sides of similar length.   The cassette has a ...

The Model (Poland, 199?) Unofficial Euro Star ES 2213 Time for another Polish pirate cassette! This time, though, a compilation, one of the few that weren't "curated", so to speak, in Poland...  "The Model 1975-1978" was a compilation on the US Cleopatra label, released in 1992. It features tracks from Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express and The Man Machine, some of them in their original single edits, and Les Mannequins which had been issued as the b-side to its English-language counterpart Showroom Dummies on a promotional "disco" 12" single. There are several Polish editions of this, this one has all the tracks from the compilation - not in the same order, though, they have been jumbled around, I suppose it was an effort to make two programmes of equal lenght. Apart from starting the cassette with the title track, which is not unjustified for a best-of compilation with a title track, they somewhat surprisingly placed Trans-Europe Express on Si...

ELECTRIC CAFE (Poland, 1992) MG 0914 Another Polish pirate edition today, and this time it's a version of Electric Cafe! I keep buying Polish cassettes, if I can find them. I think they're interesting, and there's a lot of different ones - easily the country in the world with the largest number of different Kraftwerk cassettes! As has been said before, Polish unofficial releases would often have strange/weird/surprising/striking design features, changes to the track list and other anomalies. Today's cassette is fairly straightforward though - the LP design against a white background, and band name, album title and release year in the vacant space above the image. The most interesting part of the front cover is that the colouring is off - the yellow colour seems to have been added the wrong way around, giving the design a surprisingly messy make-over... The J-card is on the usual glossy, thin paper, printed on both sides. The track list both on the back-flap and insid...

HITS (Poland, 198?) Unofficial HiTs H135 I have not forgotten the Polish pirate cassettes! Feels like it was a while ago since I featured one here, but there are plenty of them, and as I've said before, they're often interesting, even if "interesting" means "ridiculous" at times...  I was tempted to list this as "Kraftwerk", or even "Untitled", as "HiTs" is apparently the name of the label. However, that's what it says on the front, so I'll go with that - I suppose the confusion is a selling point? I mean, you look at the front, it says "Kraftwerk" and "Hits", you will assume it's a best-of compilation, right? Anyway, this is a compilation of tracks from different sources, and opens with the most known song from the 80s - "The Model", which was their biggest song in the charts in the UK, and which always received a rapturous response from live audiences on the 1981 tour.  The front cover...

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 ...

COMPUTER WORLD/ LANDSCAPE - FROM THE TEA-ROOMS OF MARS... (Saudi-Arabia, 1981?) Unofficial - 747, 6839 Another unofficial release from Saudi-Arabia today, and it's a split cassette! I've had one item from the Saudi '747' label before, a C-60 with one-and-a-half Kraftwerk album. In this instance, it's another C-60, with 30 minutes of Computer World followed by a different artist altogether! Landscape were originally a jazz funk outfit, but hopped the New Romantic bandwagon and made  a couple albums of synth pop, of sorts. Anyway, on the B-side here, you get 7 of the 11 tracks that make up the album "From The Tea-Rooms Of Mars .... To The Hell-Holes Of Uranus". The J-card is a hi-quality glossy 2-panel card, printed on one side. Again, as was the case with the previous cassette on the 747 label, the front cover has a unique design, a rather clever merging of the Landscape album cover with a re-assembling of the heads of the Kraftwerk dummies, as seen on t...