The Bollywood Brass Band are a brave bunch. They are a London-based group of Asian and English enthusiasts who re-work Indian film music, from the 1950s onwards, using only brass and percussion. That may seem an impossibly limiting task, granted the classic vocal performances and sweeping strings that accompany so many Bollywood epics, but what the Brass Band offer instead is variety, classy arrangements, and energy.
At Cargo, they came on wearing Bollywood T-shirts, baggy trousers and sashes. The four percussionists included two with enormous Indian dhol drums slung around their necks, while the six-piece brass section had trumpets, trombone and a lady hidden beneath a sousaphone. They sounded like some cheerful trad jazz band with mysterious eastern influences and a thunderous percussion section. So far, so good, but it seemed hard to see how they could sustain a purely instrumental set. They did so by swapping styles and using clever stagecraft.

Dancers can be a ghastly embarrassment at concerts, but Simmy Gupta was a welcome exception, with her cool, stylish interpretations of the film songs. When she left the stage, there were clips from the films themselves, from a notable display of Indian mini-skirt dancing in the 1970s, through to a Michael Jackson-inspired dance workout, set to Urvashi Urvashi by the great Bollywood composer, AR Rahman.

Then there were excursions away from Bollywood. There was a furious, predictably percussive Indian wedding song, and a burst of Pakistani qawwali, with Mustt Mustt, the song made famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (with help from Massive Attack). A brass band version of this classic vocal tour de force should have been ridiculous, but came off - thanks to some good trumpet work, as did the final frantic dancing to a Punjabi folk tune. Brass and percussion were enough after all.