The Warsaw Village Band would have roused even the most weary festival-goer with their mixed message of endangered Polish folk and contemporary effects.

Dressed in peasant garb and mostly stony-faced, their pagan rhythms were underpinned with a striking dulcimer and furious fiddle.

Other traditional instruments - the baraban, thesuka and frame drums - accompanied a startling dual vocal, passionate and lyrically complex. The songs were mostly short and sharp. A little longer and the crowd would have been able to find its feet, but both the humour of these pagan rebels and their love of old calypso and polka translated well into the modern mileu.

On a musical platform provided by their ancestors, they were down with war and up with freedom. It certainly hit the mark with the Brighton Polish contingent who filled the groupie section down front.

The closing songs gave a finale of fast ambient festival hypnosis, longer and more danceable. Without a guitar in sight, the string-driven backdrop to a reverbed fiddle solo and driving drums had everyone celebrating the talents of these Polish villagers.