After viewing behind-the-scenes footage from the studio a few weeks back, we couldn’t wait to hear how Shane MacGowan’s version of a Haiti benefit single (featuring our kind of all-star guest list) would pan out. Well, the day has come…

Watch here or below (via Stereogum) as MacGowan is joined by Nick Cave, the Clash’s Mick Jones, Eliza Doolittle, Paloma Faither, Chrissie Hynde, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, ex-Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, and Johnny freakin’ Depp for their take on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ famous “I Put A Spell On You.”

MacGowan and friends ask that donations toward Haiti relief be made to Concern Worldwide here and/or by pre-ordering their charity single here.

Watch/purchase/donate:

Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s famous musical The Threepenny Opera has influenced countless musicians and artists over the years, including Bob Dylan, who discusses it at length in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, so it makes sense that the 1928 masterpiece is now being turned into a motion-capture movie with Gollum/Ian Dury actor Andy Serkis to star and Nick Cave to helm the score/soundtrack.

“It’s nice to announce it in its hometown,” Serkis said after revealing the project in Berlin while promoting his new film Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, reports Screen Daily.

The above details are all that is known about this exciting project as of now, but in the meantime, check out Cave’s cover of the most famous Threepenny song, “Mack The Knife,” on the September Songs soundtrack here.

As promised, we’re following up with more deets on that epic Haiti charity single put together by Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, renaissance man Nick Cave and actor/musician Johnny Depp. If you recall, MacGowan, Cave, Depp and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie were reported to have teamed up to cover Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You.”

But that’s not news, that’s olds (to paraphrase Ricky Gervais). The new bit is that the already-epic team was joined by Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols, Mick Jones of The Clash, and Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders—and the session was covered by the UK’s Channel 4 (video below). Notably absent from the television segment was Depp.

Believe me, that headline sounded too good to be true to us as well, not to mention that this news was initially reported by one of Rupert Murdoch’s least reliable news outlets, UK rag The Sun, but the Guardian confirmed today that Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan has called on famous friends Johnny Depp, Nick Cave, and Bobby Gillespie to record a cover song to benefit Haiti disaster relief. What song are they covering? Only one of the greatest of all time: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ 1958 hit “I Put a Spell On You.”

As the Guardian aptly notes, Cave’s former band The Birthday Party also covered the Hawkins classic (watch them perform the song in 1981 here), as well as a slew of other artists, incuding Nina Simone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Joe Cocker.

No other details about this epic charity single are available at this time, but photographer Danny Clifford teased in a blog post that “later this week all will be revealed.”

**Update: A followup post is on the way, but in the meantime, watch this video with footage from the studio!

We’ve been hyping a number of big projects set to come out this year lately, but now one has been sadly lost. We posted last fall about Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat’s next project, a film adaptation of the novel The Wettest Country in the World, featuring a Cave-penned script, and what we later found out was set to star (TFB favorite) Ryan Gosling and Shia LaBeouf. Well, I’m not happy to report that the film, The Promised Land, has become the victim of the struggling non-franchise portion of the film industry.

“My own new project – with a much-loved script by Nick Cave and a dream all-star cast – has fallen apart,” wrote Hillcoat in a diary entry published in the Telegraph (via /Film). “The finance company that we began The Road with has also fallen apart, having to radically downsize to one remaining staff member. The great divide has begun, with only very low-budget films being made or huge 3-D franchise films.”

Hillcoat goes on to bemoan internet piracy and the current economic climate, adding, “I end the year appropriately – gazing into the apocalypse of my own industry.”

It’s likely to provide little consolation, but at least we have that Grizzly Bear-scored Ryan Gosling film to look forward to. Okay, that was a weak attempt to end this story on a happy note. R.I.P. The Promised Land and Nick Cave’s gold statue.

As The Age reported this morning (via Pitchfork), former guitarist and Nick Cave collaborator from the Birthday Party and the Boys Next Door Rowland S. Howard has died of liver cancer while on a waiting list for a liver transplant. He was 50.

Former bandmate Mick Harvey spoke publicly about the sad news, saying, “Sometimes people are ready to go because they have been sick for a long time, but Rowland really wanted to live.”

Now Nick Cave has also released a statement, via the Birthday Party’s label, Mute Records: “This is very sad news,” stated Cave. “Rowland was Australia’s most unique, gifted and uncompromising guitarist. He was also a good friend. He will be missed by many.”

Memorials and essays on Howard’s undeniably vital influence on music will be circulating shortly, but in the meantime, check out The Age’s obituary here and LA Weekly’s video-heavy remembrance here.

Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat are developing quite the symbiotic relationship: Cave wrote the script for (and scored) Hillcoat’s The Proposition (one of our favorite movies here at 24b) and scored Hillcoat’s upcoming The Road. Now the pair are working on two new projects: bringing The Death of Bunny Munro to the telly and new film The Wettest County to the big screen.

Cave mentioned to Spinner last month that he’d be interested in taking his latest book, The Death of Bunny Munro, from the page to the screen:

“I want to do a TV series or at least like a three-part TV series. You can go deeper with TV in a way, within actually creating a character. You have more time to live with the character.”

When Nick Cave isn’t dropping new Grinderman records, scoring films, writing novels, or erecting gold statues of himself, he likes to dabble in screenwriting. Most notably, Cave wrote the fantastic John Hillcoat-directed film The Proposition and a totally insane sequel to Gladiator, in which Russell Crowe’s “Maximus meddles with Roman gods in the afterlife, is reincarnated, defends early Christians, reunites with his son, and ultimately lives forever – leading tanks in the second world war and even mucking around in the modern-day Pentagon.”

Now Cave is teaming up with Hillcoat again (though he did write the soundtrack to Hillcoat’s new film The Road): “I’ve written another film script for John Hillcoat for a new movie,” Cave told Exclaim’s Vish Khanna. “It’s from a book called The Wettest Country in the World and it’s set in the depression. It’s about… well, it’s a new film and he’s trying to get that together.”

And sure enough, Variety confirms (via Movieweb) that Red Wagon and Columbia Pictures are backing Hillcoat’s project, which is based on Matt Bondurant’s novel about Depression-era bootlegging.

Nick Cave may not believe in God, but he’s got no problem with a bit of idolatry. In a Q&A with Time’s Claire Suddath, Cave said his hopes to build a gold statue of himself in his hometown of Warracknabeal, Australia didn’t quite work out according to plan.

“Although I do have a small model of it that’s a foot high,” Cave said. “It’s gold. I’m naked on a rearing horse. I have a modest loincloth on. It’s this rather wonderful homoerotic work of art that I was hoping to put in the middle of this tiny little town where I was born. Unfortunately the fortunes of Warracknabeal are so grim at the moment with the recession and this chronic drought that’s going on that it feels a little in bad taste to erect a giant gold statue. But one day…”

Damn that economy for squashing Nick Cave’s decadent dreams. I propose that instead of a gold statue, we erect a Mt. Rushmore with the faces of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Iggy Pop. If these guys truly need to be memorialized in statue form, I think the most apt medium would be rock.