Trouble Gang — from ‘A Porky Prime Cut’

Dom is obviously not around to confirm this, very sadly, but Gaz would back me up that he swore us to secrecy and like I say I’m absolutely 100% that he’d known this would happen and that was why he’d done it. It was part of the plan and anyone who remembers Dom will not be surprised when I say this or that he did not leave it there.
That wasn’t Dom’s style. Unfortunately he didn’t really go for half-measures.
A few days later (and thinking about it now it must have taken him that long just to prepare everything) he went back more properly equipped and did a whole TG graphic: the black square, red bar across the middle, white flash of lightning down the centre. He put a smaller TG in bold white capitals at the five o’clock position. He was a great artist Dom, and a perfectionist, so he made a really good job of it, painting the whole square white first the way any artist would do, to give himself a good ground to work on for even cover and to get perfect whites in the finished piece. He used stencils and got that slightly off-register look which made it really stand out. Then he took a Polaroid of the finished article which he gave me the next day and I’ve still got, somewhere.
I don’t know who they thought was doing this, but one of their own, evidently, because during the weeks that followed as spring turned to summer the Trouble Gang’s ‘new’ graphic identity really caught on and variations on that black and red square, the lightning flash, the T and the G, started appearing around the place, further afield than just that particular wall over Turbary. You’d see home made stickers on bus stops or lamp posts, that kind of thing.
Trouble Gang.
The lightning flash.
‘Oh, aye-aye,’ Gaz would say.

From the short story ‘A Porky Prime Cut’.

Listen to Tony White’s reading of ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ with music from UK Acid House pioneer Richard Norris, as performed at the Free University of Glastonbury and the October Gallery, London.