10 Rock Music Collaborations No One Could Have Predicted
Just when you think you know a band, they make friends with the most unexpected people...
Collaborations in music are a special time for bands and fans.
For the artists involved, it gives them a chance to work with friends, heroes, inspirations, or even increase their stock, working with bigger names to get their music heard by a greater audience. For fans, they get to see their favourite artists experiment a bit and potentially work with other artists they like (lawd praise that Ihsahn/Matt Heafy collab).
Sometimes they work, and they are lucrative for all involved, and everybody's happy. And rich. And the world is a better place for it.
Other times we get Lulu. And then world just gets sad...
Typically, collaborating artists stay within their own worlds, i.e. Bring Me the Horizon working with Architects bro Sam Carter, or Cheap Trick's Robin Zander guesting on fellow lady-lovin' glam metal stars Steel Panther for their cover of "She's Tight", but occasionally artists will work outside their comfort zone to varying degrees of success.
I would give examples, but then that would take away the purpose of this list...
10. Gallows & Simon Neil
By the time of 2009's Grey Britain, Watford-based punk juggernaut Gallows were perhaps the biggest and most talked about band of the genre.
On the back of their debut effort Orchestra of Wolves, Gallows had signed a £1 million record deal with Warner Bros, was featured in Guitar Hero III (and in an episode of Eastenders), had won themselves a Kerrang! Award, became a regular on the festival scene and had already began outside collaborations, recording a cover of The Ruts' "Staring at the Rude Bois" with grime mainstay Lethal Bizzle.
With grime's close ties to punk, Bizzle's appearances maybe quite as big a shock as Simon Neil of mainstream alt rock darlings Biffy Clyro.
With 2009 also seeing Biffy working towards their own groundbreaking album Only Revolutions, so it is almost poetic to see the crossover between the two acts. The song, a powerful little ditty about how death comes for us all, features Neil's melodic, straight-outta-Kilmarnock vocals complimenting Frank Carter's relentless bark into an otherwise trademark, riff-heavy punk onslaught.