Da VIKING NATION!

MOTORWAYS CAN BE MOST RELAXING. (amazing spa room via at the Clarion Hotel, Courtesy of Diego)

ALL THE MAIN BOYS AT THE PARTY: Patrick, Ash,Martin & Emma.

MY SELF & A GAY VIKING!

CUTE SWEDISH MUMS. Nina & her gorgeous mate.

BROVA KRISTER SINGING LIKE A MUTHA! RESPEX! PETER IS BEHIND HIM!

CATHARINE & DJ FINN(AKA BROVA ANDREW)

SAVAGE ARSE!

LISA TAKING IMPORTANT EXECUTIVE BUSINESS CALLS & REPRESENTING

 When ever I talk about work & business I always say that the main ingredient of any business is the people within that business. You can have the best idea & shit loads of cash. But with out the crew you do not really have much to go on. On this basis I always check to see who is around me before I start venturing in to new territories & projects.

So to open a Savage London store in Stockholm (Sweden) came as a pretty natural choice. I got loads of mates there. I employ, at any given time, at least 1 or 2 Vikings in London. Admittedly I am biased & not because I need to either. Here we got a people that have true roots & culture. They work hard & play hard. They have some thing that some times vanishes in to thin air. Integrity. Our lot used to be a little like this before. So I get a text from my favourite Viking, Lisa saying there is a store going at such & such & it is a good time to get cracking. Given the level of interest that we already had from Sweden I jumped in. As chimps do. I checked the shop out in June & we started trading from the 15th August.

Budget for this brand new venture came courtesy of me American Express card, which I yet have to pay. I have 7 more days. Can you all start ordering NOW!

By the time stuff was agreed with Landlords, existing tenant etc, I already had the correct staff in place & working. Lisa had the basic crew allocated for me & we were off. The good bit being that they all got their boy friends working too. Linda , you 2 are the same?, absolutely kicked arse. She put together the most amazing opening night at Mondo's (cool fucking place). Her boy friend, DJ Joel (ONE TRUE VIKING) together with Mr Peter Beinisch (ONE TRUE HALF VIKING), DJ Ronin & ma main man DJ HKB Finn ( London) totally kicked butt. I am told we out packed the MTV evening that was going on the same night. Personally, I find it hard to believe. But then again, anything is possible where Vikings are concerned. I tell ya: WE FUCKING ROCKED DA HOUSE.

The store is basically in the up & coming trendy part of Stockholm, Sodermalm, with lots of cool bars & restaurants all over the place. It is crawling with pretty young fings that are just gagging for madness. It is more spacious than the stores in London. I designed & made it look like a country cabin, kinda, thing. With tree bark as the flooring & stained wooden shelves. You will not find metal,glass or stone in this place. Warm & cozy to deal with the harsher winters they get over there. The crew that helped me do this were absolutely amazing. The pictures speak for themselves & I hope convey the feel of the event & the place. All in all Thank you Vikings for fucking representing.

Here are the boys & girls they totally fucking represented:
Sarah Bird: You are one in a million (taking care of biz at base & in Stockholm), Lisa: Hej. You rock girl, Linda: Princess of Soder, Peter: I just love it, Joel: Louder please, HKB Finn: More dub please, Patrick: Thank you for the cordless tools, Zarah: Where are you?, Malin: Love that dog, Martin: 15 Js later & still running (fank U bro), Katrina: you one cool sista, Krister: This voice of yours, Ash: I work when & how I want (respex), Emma: another true Viking, Svart Cafe: cappuccinos by gorgeous girls (Yum), Jenny & Josephine (my cute neighbours), Peter Nyberg (Cool Land Lord), Olof: the sailor man (thank you for waiting for your money), Margot: best accountant lady I met so far (thank you for asking Olof to wait for his money), In De Betou family: You are brilliant (Big respex), Johan: for being around when we were talking shit & drinking huge volumes of beer, Maria: thanks for pissing in the bush, Maria: she who don't forget, Dan: U da man (fixer of electrical accidents), Nina: For sitting next to me on the plane, Karin: first accurate & cool journalist I met, Erica: for the beautiful illustration, Anna: for calling people & pushing & believing.

Now you know why a business can not do shit without the people support & I am a very lucky monkey to know such a cool buncha muthas.

K. Savage
20th Sept2003

	LINDA THE RODENT MURDERER!
THE RABBIT, BEFORE BEING WASHED TO DEATH!	DOG AT MA BALLS.
USUAL TRANSPORTATION.	JESS HELPING ME

UNIQUELY CHALLENGING!

Fake Moss: Sufferer

A True Queen showing bit of fluff

Paul: Frog pose

Stella: Dad pose

 These are the words of the Chief Executive geezer at the Gucci Group. That's right. The guys with the cool shades & bad perfumes. They also own a host of other brands, namely, Yves St Laurent, Alexander McQueen & of course the ultimate darling of our beloved fashion industry the talentless Stella Mc Cartney. The daughter of the talentless Paul Mc Cartney. Wrote the frog song after one John Lennon, decided he did not want to play with him any more. About 30 something years ago.

The fashion industry as a whole suffers from its very own syndrome, normally recognised as bullshit. Correct medical terminology being Fake-O-mytosis. It is an incurable condition & this chap Domenico De Sole, CEO of Gukki, is by far an excellent case in history. He has it bad! In the normal world & real world when a company loses money they report it in a multitude of ways but not Uniquely Challenging. The group has lost 97% in profits in 3 months & here is the amounts involved. Operating profits, day to day activity of the business, has dropped from a profit of 20 million Euros to Minus 24 million Euros. That's not a challenge. Its fucked. The actual income dropped from 35 million Euros to 1.2 million Euros. This too is not a challenge but a sign from the gods to head down to the local job centre.

As in all cases of Fake-O-mytosis, the victim blames everything around him. The reasons for such bad performance are:
a) Saddam, b) The China Man Flu, c) Suicide bombers in Jerusalem, d) Osama & his Wicked posse d) Any other current affair issue such as Ken Livingston digging up Trafalgar Square. Bollocks.

The reason for the slide is a simple one. The designers in the portfolio are rubbish & their whole brand relies entirely on over priced hype. Their work lacks creativity. Any celebrity who is wearing a Queen's outfit or a Stella dress has been given it free to hype the shit up some more. The average punter can not afford it & will be hard pushed to fork out good money for weak designs. The days of global domination of over hyped brands such as Yves St Laurent, Gucci, McQueen et al appear to be over & thank fuck. Now some real talent may get a chance. That is what I call uniquely challenging. The ability to recognise reality.

K. Savage
15th July 2003

EUROMEE!

 If I had a daughter this week I think I will call her Euromee. It sounds good & will also be a life time reminder to her, as well as me, that stuff is finally evolving, progressing & changing.

I find it staggering that joining the Euro has even become such an over blown debate. Maybe it is to do with our ability to accept the inevitable. The arguments against joining the Euro are at best weak. The housing market collapse. Well fuck me. I Let the damn thing collapse. It is well over priced to the point that the average couple/person has to be on £100k income before they can even look at some thing reasonable & I mean reasonable. Nothing extravagant. The UK house prices, particularly London, are stupidly over priced. The only fuckers that have benefited from this are the god damn Estate Agents, normally Tory voters! What's new there. The other fact that the rest of Europe has long come to realise & we have as well, privately but not publicly, is the dominance of the US dollar as a world currency. This in turn has had enormous impact on European & world economy through sheer weight & bulk. Apart from the post war period of US economic boom, up to the early 80's, the US economy has been consistently declining with its massive deficits. The only way their economy gets rolling, it seems, is when they go and fight some poor defenceless bugger & then invoice the damn event to the rest of the world & get an awful lot of freebies in the goodie bag that follows each war. In the case of Iraq, it will probably be free oil for the next 1000 years for fixing & patching the roads & hospitals that were bombed.

Gordon straightens up a stack of impressive looking books.

Just like the US economy, the European economy has also become near stagnant in the manufacturing sector. It is safe to accept that manufacturing is an all important ingredient of the capitalist system. So if we can't produce stuff then it eventually implodes to leave nothing but mass unemployment & inflation as well as even higher house prices! We don't really want that either, do we? Enter the not so accidental joining of Slovak & Central Eastern European nations. Guess what they are going to be doing, in our back yards. Yeaps! They going to do the bulk of our manufacturing. Because labour is much cheaper there & the whole labour force will at best be unskilled. This means our Nike trainers, cars, shirts & a zillion other consumer goods can be made inside a "home economy". Sweden, England, France & Germany will be the tech guys. The clever buggers with the technology & Poland will be the place to make what they designed 1000 miles away & the world our market. Compare this to the affluent Silicon Valley of California Vs Smallsville in Idaho!

I can see how this will really piss the yanks off. They have been doing this for over 50 years. However, due to sheer lack heritage, culture or perhaps more politely put, that the US is not a mature democracy & just does not understand long term history. They have behaved irresponsibly on all fronts towards every other nation. The only thing they understand is money, normally $$$$$ & not much else. So the only way to beat it is economically. No single European nation can do this alone. But jointly the Euro will be a fair competition to the US dollar. This will, I hope, reduce their future ability, to go to war on credit.

Gordon juggles with Tony's head.

So the issue is far less economical & almost entirely political. It is not about the creation of a super European Nation. But more about a currency that can hold its own when the boys in the stock exchanges start buying/selling US dollars in huge volumes to score various political agendas. A move closer to truer form of capitalism & less imperialistic. I can also understand why Tony Blair is not going ahead with his promised referendum & blaming, virtually, the whole thing on his best mate, Gordon Brown. It is the wrong time to do this, not because we are have failed 3 of the 5 economic tests. It is really to do with the fact that the politics have failed. We went to a war against another nation to find Biological & Chemical weapons on the insistence & technical advise of our "natural ally". Nothing has been found & the voters are likely to vote against it just to piss Tony & Gordon off.

As for all the patriotic talk regarding ditching the pound I can only say that we heard all this rubbish when the old currency was ditched 30 years ago. Then the same rhetoric came up on going metric. What ever our currency is & how ever we measure the weight of a bag of potato we all know that we roast them in a funny way on Sundays. That is heritage, culture, tradition or what ever you want to call it. It never changes.

K. Savage
10th June 2003