Sleeping Dogs - Beware

SLEEPING DOGS - BEWARE

On their début album, Conflict took an unusual direction for a so-called 'street Punk band' and veered off at one point with the track Vietnam Serenade, touching upon the subject of American foreign policy in Latin America: "They say it's in the name of the law, will Vietnam be the forerunner to El Salvador? Another nine years of killings, injuries and rapes?"

To the stereotypical Vicious Sidney Punk fan, Vietnam and El Salvador probably meant at best Apocalypse Now and something to do with The Clash's Sandanista album. To those taking a keener interest in the wider world, however, it meant American imperialism and US military aid to an extreme Right-wing dictatorship.

America in the early Eighties was (and probably had always been and always will be) a vast, bubbling cauldron of gigantic contradictions. An immense patchwork quilt of staggering beauty, brilliance, ugliness and despair headed much like in Britain by an Establishment easily capable of cold and calculating wickedness.

If an intensifying stand-off against Russian communism in Europe via the stationing of Cruise missiles wasn't bad enough, perhaps soon to be superseded by the escalation of the arms race into space via the Strategic Defence Initiative, America was also at surreptitious war in its own backyard against the forces of communism in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Not wishing these countries to go the way of Cuba and become fully-fledged Marxist states bankrolled by Moscow, the US government was happy to channel millions of dollars in economic and military aid into propping up their corrupt but pro-American dictatorships. Turning a blind eye to human-rights abuses and (in Guatemala in particular) what amounted to genocide, America justified its support and its actions by perceiving it as front-line defence of its borders against the communist threat.

This whole subject was dealt with far more thoroughly than Conflict's acknowledgement of it in the next release on Crass Records. Beware was a 5-track EP by Sleeping Dogs, a three-piece band from San Francisco previously featured on Bullshit Detector 2 under the name of American Arsenal. Aided and abetted by Penny Rimbaud and Pete Wright on drums and bass respectively, most interestingly the band included as one of its two vocalists a certain Dave King, the artist responsible for designing the now iconic Crass logo.

In regard to all of the Crass personnel, nothing much was known about them as individual personalities. The work was all. From the start, this had apparently been the intention with the black clothes, the pseudonyms, and the collective voice in interviews all adding to the anonymity. An outcome of this, however, was a shrouding of Crass in a mystique and an arousing of possibly even greater curiosity. So successful was this 'wall of Crass' that not only did it eliminate each member's personal identity and personal history but it enforced, strengthened and accentuated the 'invented' selves - the personalities representing Crass via pseudonyms such as 'Eve Libertine' and 'Steve Ignorant'. It was an odd and wholly unexpected occurrence.

The person behind the design of the Crass logo was even more of a mystery. As Gee was the Crass member who designed all the posters and record sleeves it was presumed that it was her (or could 'Gee' have been a 'he'?) who designed the logo. It wasn't. Now, years later, the real culprit - Dave King - was emerging as a member of a band called Sleeping Dogs, though as might be expected, emerging under a pseudonym: 'BB' or 'Bad Boy'.

To angular, disjointed, industrial dance grooves, Sleeping Dogs sang of the passing on of fear and guilt from generation to generation, fucked-up relationships, the meaning of war, urbanization, and El Salvador. This being the first American band to appear on Crass Records, it made sense that they should focus on American current affairs as well as more universal themes, so in the track (I Got My Tan In) El Salvador a picture is painted of the situation in the banana republic of the song's title: "Death squads in the street, they do what they want... The military is suffering from paranoia, anyone not in uniform is suspect. They rape, they torture and then they kill. Unspeakable violence, unimaginable suffering. Too many bodies, too little land, decades of oppression by military governments - supported by America." It's not too unfair to say that Sleeping Dogs weren't the easiest nor the most happiest of bands to dance to.

Expounding further upon the same subject, newspaper clippings referring to the goings-on in South America crammed the record sleeve's cover that as per normal with Crass Records releases, folded out into a photo-montage poster, this time depicting the vast continent of America - the land of the free - mastered by industry.

Acting as confirmation of America's fears regarding a communist invasion, a few years earlier a popular uprising had taken place in Nicaragua that had overthrown the debauched dictatorship that had been ruling the country for over forty years and replaced it with a new, Leftist government. The Somoza dictatorship had been toppled but much of its old guard had not gone away and it was these counter-revolutionaries called the 'Contras' that the Reagan administration continued to support both financially and militarily. What with America then enforcing a trade embargo and mining the Nicaraguan ports, the new Sandanista government was under siege.

In response to this, thousands of Leftists from around the world flocked to the Sandanistas aid, offering support and solidarity in whatever way was needed. Whilst the Clash named their fourth album after the Sandanistas, hundreds of British volunteers made their way to Nicaragua to help the besieged economy by working on construction sites and on the coffee plantations. One of those volunteers being Rab Herman, one time acquaintance of Dave King, Phil (Wally Hope) Russell and Penny Rimbaud - and original guitarist in Crass before being replaced by Phil Free.

The Sandanista revolution was a beacon of rebellious hope against the forces of conservative power and control as represented by Reagan and Thatcher. On the surface at least, the issues were all very clear and easily understood: the Sandanistas were the good guys - heroic, brave, dignified campesinos committed to the redistribution of land and wealth; whilst the Contras were the bad guys - sadistic, CIA-sponsored thugs committing atrocities against their own people for the sake of the US dollar. If ever there was a black-and-white, politically straightforward war of ideologies then this was it...