Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to Release Soundtrack Anthology In September; You’ll Hear ‘The Road’ Score Early

Nick Cave is a busy, busy man. He just wrapped up a lengthy tour in support of last year’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! record with a storming show at the Latitude Festival in the UK, he’s publishing his second novel, “The Death of Bunny Munro,” in September, and continuing to support “Do You Love Me Like I Love You,” a series of 14 short films about the Bad Seeds’ back catalog, the latest of which premiered in London last month.

And now, on September 21st, Mute Records will be releasing White Lunar, a double CD collection of recent film scores composed by Cave with his longtime collaborator (rocking the greatest beard in rock-and-roll) Warren Ellis (via P4K). The first disc will include extracts from their superb work for 2005’s revisionist western “The Proposition” (which Cave, as you may remember, also wrote the screenplay for) and another western, “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford,” along with some of the score from the upcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “The Road,” which will be our first chance to hear that music seeing as the film doesn’t hit until October 16.

This will be accompanied by a second disc including an “instrumental suite” of rarities, and two documentary scores by Cave and Ellis: “The English Surgeon” (2007) and “The Girls Of Phnom Penh” (2009). We’ve never heard these, but reports suggest the music is a departure for the pair — more industrial and experimental than the folky Americana of their narrative feature scores.

Speaking of, if any L.A. dwellers are interested, “The English Surgeon,” which focuses on an English brain surgeon who travels to the Ukraine, opens at the Laemmle Music Hall on July 31st, and sounds well worth checking out.

On the screenwriting front, back in 2006, Cave was talking up a new film he had written for Ray Winstone, a ‘British sex romp’ set in Brighton. That appeared to have stalled, but from what we hear about “The Death of Bunny Munro,” it sounds like he may have turned that script into a novel. Will its publication see a revival of interest in the project? Or, god willing, will someone finally make the amazing-sounding sequel to “Gladiator” that Cave wrote for Ridley Scott?… – Oliver Lyttelton