A star-studded Haiti telethon is to add a UK leg after Rihanna, Jay-Z, Coldplay and Bono agreed to perform in the early hours of tomorrow morning to raise funds for the earthquake-stricken nation.
The chart-topping musicians announced they will perform live from London for the transatlantic TV special as the hastily arranged MTV event attracted ever-growing numbers of A-list stars.
Expected to be the most widely viewed telethon in history, Hope For Haiti Now will see Oscar-winning actor George Clooney host the Los Angeles event and the Haitian-born hip-hop star Wyclef Jean present the New York leg. The London anchor is yet to be announced.
Launching at 1am (GMT), the telethon will jump between the three cities, taking in performances from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, Stevie Wonder and Sting, while the CNN journalist Anderson Cooper reports live from the devastated Caribbean nation.
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Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, Shakira, Christina Aguilera, Dave Matthews, John Legend, and Sheryl Crow will also sing.
Their performances will then be uploaded to Apple’s iTunes store and sold for $0.99 (61p) to raise funds for the victims of last Tuesday’s earthquake.
Bono and Jay-Z are hoping to contribute further to the fundraising effort by marketing a duet about the impoverished nation’s plight. The pair are understood to have already written and produced the track and will give the song its debut, with the help of Rihanna and Bono’s U2 bandmate The Edge, during tomorrow morning’s telethon.
The music mogul Simon Cowell has also announced that he is working on a charity single. The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent judge is expected to use the voices of show winners Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle and his fellow X Factor judge Cheryl Cole on the track.
The multi-platinum-selling artist Wyclef Jean has already raised $2 million since the 7.0-magnitude quake struck the capital of Port-au-Prince, killing an estimated 200,000 and leaving as many as 500,000 homeless. The former Fugees rapper, who emigrated from Haiti to the US as a teenager, has been digging bodies from the rubble in his home country while making emotional appeals to the public to donate to his Yele Haiti Foundation.
Almost 40 TV networks have agreed to screen the telethon, while an array of influential websites, including YouTube and MySpace, will stream the event in its entirety.
Funds raised will be split evenly among a number of relief organisations, including The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, United Nations World Food Programme Oxfam America, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, UNICEF, and the Yele Haiti Foundation
