Pandora: Rourke 'n' roll... Mickey Rourke joins the Rotten Hill Gang

The rock'n'roll jewellery designer Stephen Webster claims to have persuaded Mickey Rourke to provide percussion for his band, The Rotten Hill Gang. (REUTERS/Toby Melville)

Earplugs at the ready. News, now, of a musical collaboration to make Dame Shirley Bassey's duet with Dizzee Rascal look conventional.

The rock'n'roll jewellery designer Stephen Webster claims to have persuaded Mickey Rourke – last seen beating fellow beefcakes to a pulp in The Wrestler – to provide percussion for his band, The Rotten Hill Gang, when they make their appearance at Jalouse nightclub later on this week.

"Mickey's a great friend of mine so why not get him involved?" Webster explains.

The Gang already boasts a revolving all-star line up, with Mick Jones frequently playing guitar with them. Rourke, meanwhile, is in London after attending Sunday's Baftas. If he does take to the stage at the gig, which is planned for Wednesday, it promises to be quite a departure from The Wrestler. The band describe themselves as playing "Dickensian hip hop" telling "stories as putrid as decaying vegetables at the end of a day in Portobello Road market".

Says Webster: "Mickey will be fabulous on tambourine."

No doubt he's touched.

Mulligan ditches Wintour's advice

It's a brave woman who doesn't take the style advice of American Vogue's frosty editrix Anna Wintour. "She said I should wear short to the Oscars," says Carey Mulligan. "I was like 'No!'" Mulligan, pictured, wore a full-length gown to collect her best actress gong at the Baftas and has no plans to raise hemlines in time for the Los Angeles awards. She and Wintour were snapped sitting together at New York Fashion Week, though it seems the conversation wasn't exactly flowing. "She's lovely, but she's Anna Wintour." Quite.

Cameron's week gets even worse

*No thawing of relations between Terry Gilliam and James Cameron. Rumours of frostiness between the auteurs have circulated since Gillian accused Cameron's mega-bucks flick Avatar of squeezing smaller films out of the market. Asked at Evian's Bafta after-party whether he'd be following in Cameron's footsteps and making films in 3D any time soon, the former Monty Python star snapped: "I'm fighting to make 3D characters in 2D movies instead of making 2D characters in 3D movies." Ouch.

Not my job...

Austin Mitchell, Labour MP for Grimsby, is doing his best to quash whispers of "not getting it". Last week he appeared in Channel 4's documentary Tower Block of Commons, but, unlike his fellow participants, refused to lodge with the council tenants.

"We were to live on £100," a defensive Mitchell complains in this week's House magazine. "I refused – but kept the money, the only dosh we got from the production company. On £100 you couldn't make a pigsty liveable, entertain new friends, and live."

All well and good, though his case isn't aided by the small fact that he has been chairman of the parliamentary group defending council housing for some years.