Pete Doherty will take to the stage later this month at one of London’s more august venues to sing sea shanties. Of course, fans who know the right pubs near his Wiltshire pile might well be able to see Doherty do this for free. But the Barbican show is a little more special. The Babyshambles singer is lending his voice to Rogue’s Gallery – Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys.

It’s the latest evening devised by the producer Hal Willner to take rock stars out of their comfort zones. His themed shows and albums have spanned the music of Kurt Weill, Leonard Cohen and Harold Arlen and offered some of pop’s most surprising collisions. He has persuaded Iggy Pop to recite Edgar Allen Poe and Tom Waits to scare the daylights out of Heigh Ho. Last year Willner’s Forest Of No Return at the RFH saw Shane McGowan, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave and Doherty yelp their way through Home Sweet Home.

The Rogue’s Gallery album – with Bono, Sting and Bryan Ferry discovering their inner salty dog – appeared two years ago, inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean. It was the idea of Johnny Depp and the film’s director Gore Verbinski to try a modern take on these ancient chanteys (as the antique spelling has it) and Willner was asked to steer the ship.

“Some people call it the original punk,” says Willner, while taking his morning sharpener – a jug of coffee with a double espresso chaser. “I listened to the field recordings – the real old Popeyes – made various compilations to play to artists and they said, ‘Why don’t you just release this?’

“Some of those old songs were improvised. You can hear people making up lyrics on deck. They are work songs, laments to lost loves, stories, songs to hang out to. You can pinpoint where they come from – Cape Cod, Australia, Liverpool . . .

“Sean Lennon told me how his dad loved these things. You listen to some of the Beatles songs and you can hear the influence – and not just the obvious ones, like Yellow Submarine.”

Willner, a grizzled New Yorker, could do a passable Pugwash impression himself with his wry grin and apparent love of a pie (his father ran a delicatessen). He does not quite know who will be on stage in London – there are shows in Gateshead and Dublin beforehand – though Eliza and Martin Carthy, Martha Wainwright and the actor Tim Robbins are definites.

It helps that by this stage of his career the producer has a hefty contacts book. A Willner “cast of thousands” is often not finalised until the last minute, and depends on who is in town. “With this type of material it’s a little easier than, say, Thelonious Monk. This is earthy stuff – anyone can hear a song and an hour later they can do it.”

Doherty is also a definite. “At the Disney show he was spectacular on Chim Chim Cheree. He’s one of those guys who is a natural music person. I gather he’s appeared on stage in various ‘moods’ but he’s a real artist, not just a person who sings.”

Talking of artists’ moods, does Willner have to contend with warring egos as stars vie for top billing? A recent Leonard Cohen tribute show, for instance, had Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave and Laurie Anderson rubbing shoulders. “Rarely. At the end of the day we all love music and I hope that comes across. These things are not set out to be star fests. The show is about the concept not the star. If it’s about the star it becomes weird, and the audience feels it.”

Any tantrums? Apparently not. “Very rarely I’ve had artists come to the show and think it’s great and then call up afterwards and say, ‘No, that wasn’t me there.’ They didn’t feel it was something they would normally do.

“But when the shows are right it’s amazing to watch from backstage. For stars the performance is almost secondary, it’s the scene around it. There was one show when we had David Thomas [of Pere Ubu] singing with Van Dyke Parks’s string section and with Percy Heath [of the Modern Jazz Quartet] on bass. On the floor watching is Philip Glass, waiting to go on, and standing by him are Elvis Costello and P. J. Harvey.

“This kind of mixing, it’s what I grew up thinking music would be – when you went to the Fillmore East and saw Led Zeppelin, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Bonzo Dog Band on the same bill.” Willner’s career hasn’t just been tribute albums (of which he thinks there are now too many). He is the longstanding music supervisor of the comedy show Saturday Night Live and created sound-tracks for Robert Altman (Short Cuts). When we meet in London he is over to fine-tune Lou Reed’s epic Berlin show.

So who stands out? Willner is in quiet awe of Reed, for one. “I refer to Lou as the Miles Davis of rock’n’roll. Like Miles, he is always changing and is not necessarily the one who benefits from the changes. You can’t deny the influence of the Velvet Underground, Transformer, the importance of Berlin, even Metal Machine Music. People have all followed on from those.

“And it’s great to see Lou happy. He’s got married to Laurie [Anderson]. They are amazing together. And it’s great to see Berlin, this work that was once vilified, get standing ovations.”

Willner has just finished recording a new album with another favourite, Marianne Faithfull, singing tunes ranging from Bessie Smith to the Decemberists. “She’s got a great voice – she’s our Piaf, our Dietrich. You can’t learn to be that.”

In October he will stage the 20th-anniversary concert of his original Disney tribute Stay Awake in LA and is inviting Ringo Starr to reprise When You Wish Upon a Star. The project was an awkward episode. The company’s executives disliked what he had done to the music and would not let him use any of its characters on the album sleeve. He smiles as he recalls one difficult meeting with the suits. “It had not gone well, but at the end, one of the Disney lawyers comes up to me and whispers, ‘I love that record Strange Weather you made with Marianne Faithfull. It helped me through my divorce.’

“I used to get angry about such things. But not any more.” His grin widens. “Back in 1979 I was a cab driver making records at night. But since then I haven’t had a straight job. I’m very fortunate.”

Rogue’s Gallery, Sage, Gateshead (www.thesagegateshead.org), July 24; Barbican, EC2 (www.barbican.org.uk), July 28 2008

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