The world of Arran jumpers and fingers in the ear is light years away from the samples and traditional Indian instruments featured on The Imagined Village album.

That said, the lyrical subjects of murder, rainy nights and soldiers clearly come from a smoky, candlelit folk club.

"It's a record that, in the time-honoured way of folk, is about sex and death, but it is also about honouring England's own distinctive traditions," says Simon Emmerson of The Afro-Celt Sound System, who has spent the last four years putting the project together.

The idea for the album came from the folk band Tiger Moth, who feature on The Imagined Village CD performing part of a ceilidh medley.

"About four years ago Ian Anderson from Tiger Moth was having a go at me about the fact I haven't done anything with English traditional music," says Simon.

"After travelling the world as a producer and musician I thought it was time to explore my own roots - to look at the earth under my feet, dig the dirt of the homelands."

To help achieve his vision Simon approached a series of musicians who resemble a who's who in folk and world music.

The live show includes Martin and Eliza Carthy, Billy Bragg, Chris Wood, Sheila Chandra, Sheema Mukharjee of Transglobal Underground, The Dhol Foundation and Glow Worms, as well as Andy Gangadeen of The Bays behind the drum kit and the Sussex-based Young Coppers, from the folk legends The Copper Family.

The record itself also features Paul Weller, poet Benjamin Zephaniah, folk bands Tunng and Tiger Moth, as well as John Copper, now head of the Copper Family after the recent death of his father Bob. John opens the record with a spoken word piece about his grandfather and the changes to the landscape around Saltdean.

For a while, Simon says, the record was envisaged as a Copper Family songbook, paying tribute to the family who had kept so many traditional English folk songs alive.

The first piece of music to be recorded for the album was the classic murder tale John Barleycorn, with Paul Weller sharing vocals with Martin and Eliza Carthy. Paul's initial discovery of the song, on a 1969 album by Traffic, was a great example of the folk tradition in action.

"It went so well we started picking more folk songs and working on more collaborations, and now here we are four years later," says Simon.

The aim was to open up the traditional English songbook to people who might not have heard the songs before - but in a playful way that represented contemporary England and the different cultures within it.

As Eliza Carthy puts it: "There is a multi-cultural aspect in there, not expressing England as one birthplace but as a place where everybody lives."

The project got its live debut in July in the appropriate surroundings of Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire.

A gorgeous mix of a country farmhouse and a top-of-the-range studio, complete with the white-bearded Mr Gabriel wandering round with a coffee cup clutched close to his chest, Real World was a perfect setting for a project which marries up the traditional with cutting-edge electronica.

Torrential rain was lashing down and with reports of flooding across nearby Oxfordshire that July morning it wasn't the most auspicious day for a new musical collaboration to reveal itself to the world.

As the players trudged through the puddles to ensconce themselves in the main studio before the performance you could see some nerves were showing.

Everyone seemed quiet and ignored the lavish buffet of traditional English meats, cheeses and pies - with real ale and cider - on offer. Only Billy Bragg took the time to remark how exciting it all was.

This live performance was the first time many of the artists on the record had actually met and worked on the same stage.

It was a precursor to the group's first festival performance at WOMAD the following weekend, as well as the autumn tour that takes in Brighton this weekend and finishes up at London's Royal Festival Hall at the end of the month.

John Copper's recorded vocal opened the show and set the scene, ushering in a very traditional folk backing of violins, guitars and drums for the album opener 'Ouses, 'Ouses, 'Ouses.

This was probably the most traditional-sounding piece of the whole hour-long concert.

Alongside Martin and Eliza's guitar and violin combination came sitars, hip-hop samples, Johnny Kalsi's deafening dhol playing and a video of Benjamin Zephaniah performing his new version of the Tam Lyn story, with references to best-selling tabloids, war refugees and customs and immigration policies.

In between songs the performers talked about the English folk tradition and the songs that inspired them, explaining how they had helped shape their careers.

As well as covering some old traditional songs, The Imagined Village contains a few re-imaginings of old songs, taking in contemporary references.

Eliza Carthy has contributed her own counting song called Acres Of Ground, while Billy Bragg has rewritten Hard Times Of Old England to include references to Tesco, empty holiday cottages and the Countryside Alliance.

Benjamin Zephaniah's re-imagining of Tam Lyn was undoubtedly a highlight and a centrepiece to the whole project.

There was a point though where it looked like this particular track might not come together.

Martin Carthy had worked with Simon on the music to the song while Simon approached the dub poet to put his own unique lyrical take on the story.

"He went to him and handed him these verses from 1800 and 1850," says Martin. "Benjamin couldn't get his head around it all.

"I got Simon to give him a version that Mike Waterson, my brother-in-law, had done. He had put it into a new vernacular, not trying to sing it like a Scotsman, more like a Yorkshireman.

"We sent Benjamin that and I think what he really picked up on is the emotional side to how Mike sings it. Benjamin did a fantastic job and he knew just how to perform it."

Benjamin transposed the tale to an urban setting, telling the story of a teenage girl seduced by a demon lover.

"Instead of her lover coming from faerie land, I have him coming from a foreign country as an asylum seeker," says Benjamin. "Both ways he's an alien."

The show featured a powerful video of Benjamin performing the song, before all hell broke loose and the musicians of Transglobal Underground took over.

The dance collective's Sheema Mukherjee was approached by Simon to provide sitar on the track. She says: "It matched beautifully. I'm classically trained so this is a very different form for me. The whole experience was very good for me."

She feels the reason folk music has lasted for so long is the fact that people often like it without realising it.

"The melody crosses over to everyone, it is a peoples' music," she says.

"In essence the tunes are very catchy, the melodies are beautiful and they are quite easy for people to remember. That is why folk has stuck around for such a long time."

Sheila Chandra adds, "You can't grow up in England and not find yourself familiar with the folk tradition. What's strange for an Indian musician is the snobbery surrounding folk. In the Indian classical tradition using folk melodies is standard practice."

Billy Bragg said that he felt people were tuning back into folk music again. He had been thinking a lot about the English folk song tradition while on a book tour promoting his own treatise on Englishness, The Progressive Patriot.

"The songs were the Brighton Argus of their day in a way," he says. "They were kept alive through generations of oral tradition.

"They are not commercial pop, but when people do cover them audiences take them to their hearts because they feel like they have found themselves.

"Scarborough Fair (by Simon and Garfunkel) led me to listen much more closely to English folk music. I hope this project will bring folk music back to where it belongs."

  • Starts 7.30pm, tickets from £15.50. Call 01273 709709.