Trading figures for Burberry, just out, show Britain’s biggest luxury brand is doing OK despite the wider economic woes. Even so, the company’s had a tricky few years. In the late 90s, Burberry moved to take its own share of the burgeoning market for designer labels. Advertising spend increased and its trademark check, once tucked away discretely in the linings of its raincoats, was applied to everything from socks to handbags. However, Burberry was quickly taken up by a demographic it would have preferred to avoid. Another core British brand, the football hooligan, claimed the label for itself. In 2004, some anxious pub landlords even barred those dressed in Burberry from their premises.

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‘Reassuringly expensive’ is the slogan one leading brewer marketed its premium product under for many years in the UK. This and a series of Jean de Florette-inspired TV ads sought to position the beer as a cut above the rest. Something not only to be drunk, but to be coveted, too. However, by 2007, the brew had become so associated with a less arty phenomenon - excessive or ‘binge’ drinking - that the tagline, and even the maker’s name, were dropped from its small-screen promotions. Today, the brand prefers to concentrate on the purity of its ingredients; hops, malted barley, maize and water, a seemingly less explosive concoction than alcohol and one-upmanship. None of which seems to have deterred the Carlsberg subsidiary Jacobsen Brewhouse, which earlier this year announced the arrival of its ‘Vintage Nr. 1′, the world’s most expensive beer.

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Why am I here? How is each of us a part of each other’s pain and sorrow? Is it too late to help heal the world? Nearly 40 years ago, Marvin Gaye’s brilliant soul/jazz/rock soliloquy lifted the lid on the corruption and complacency at the heart of Vietnam-era America. It’s a document that may not wholly answer what it’s like to be a human being in the modern age. But to this day, I can’t hear this collection without questioning whether I could be making a better job of my life.

Angry yet forgiving, insistent yet tender, graphic yet ethereal, specific yet universal, What’s Going On is as integrated and contradictory as the human condition itself. Yet through it all, the pure conviction of a single soul struggling to make sense of the chaos that life is rings as true as a clap of thunder. From the opening clarion call of the title track’s saxophone to the apocalyptic gospel of the closing Inner City Blues, Marvin ruthlessly bares his own troubled soul and so helps us reconnect with our own. No cut-and-dried tracks here. Instead songs fuse and merge till the whole becomes a symphonic mantra. Strings and piano interweave to evoke both our interdependence and the moral complexities of the issues we face. Rhythms pulse, posit and provoke. Choruses tumble down like cresting waves to clear our eyes and revitalise our consciousness. Less a simple piece of music, What’s Going On offers sustenance to the spiritually famished. For the lost we all sometimes are, it’s a glimmer of light.

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Honey and wine trickled over Kim Basinger’s ravishingly naked body. Tiny morsels directed past her clenched-shut eyes and into her pouting mouth by a youthfully hunky Mickey Rourke. For anyone of a certain age, the conjunction of sex and food will always instantly bring to mind such scenes from the now über-naff 1985 movie 91/2 Weeks. Back in the day though, the film inspired us all to a bout of comestible experimentation in our lovemaking. Never can so many bed sheets have been stained beyond redemption, so many mattresses saturated to the point their very springs rusted away, as all the while the berries splattered, the chocolate dripped, and the cream oozed. All very befitting for such a decadent decade. Since then, the event of HIV/AIDS had seemed to make such indulgent sexual practices, or at least their artistic celebration, less acceptable. Now though, Philippe Di Méo’s erotic tableware collection, Souper Fin, confirms that sex and food are firmly back on the menu.

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Perhaps more than any other artistic endeavour, rock and roll is about conjuring a sense of communion. About performer and audience affirming their common experience through the creation, transmission, and reception of music. About the catharsis, even love, you feel when another (seemingly telepathically) communicates your own ecstasies and agonies. Where more polite styles are restrained by their own formal limitations, rock and roll shamelessly pursues its democratising ends. Beyond the semantic niceties of lyric or melody, transcending the subtle nuances of rhythm or voice, this music will juxtapose the most extreme sonic opposites to make a point. Rock and roll’s supreme exponents are masters of nuance and noise, of conflict and contradiction. So it is with The Clash and their finest work, London Calling.

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