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Rock music is taking over the airwaves to celebrate Radio 2 Rocks - a day chockablock with classic rock tracks - so we're deep-diving into the archives to uncover the genre-defying records that saw rockers team up with unlikely artists.

From Lou Reed's collaboration with Metallica to the track that redefined mainstream music (we're looking at you, Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C.), here are the collaborations that we never thought would happen but we're oh so glad did...

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This epic collaboration has been cited as bringing 'hip hop into the mainstream' and 'reviving a rock band's career' by The Guardian, so we think it's safe to say that Walk This Way is a pretty big deal.

Released in 1986 with Run-D.M.C. (the hip hop trio made up of Joseph 'Run' Simmons, Darryl 'DMC' McDaniels and Jason 'Jam Master Jay'), the track was a remix of Aerosmith's 1970's hit Walk This Way but, despite its colossal success, some of the artists involved weren't initially convinced...

"We had a few reservations about it," Joe Perry (Aerosmith's lead guitarist) told the Independent. "Maybe our fans might not like it. But our love for music and trying new things far surpassed that. I heard a direct connection between what they were doing and the blues. All you had to do was have a boombox and some wit and some talent. And a way to express yourself, which is what they were doing on the street corner. Which is what blues was."

It all ended up swimmingly in the end, though, and secured the groups a spot in the UK and US Top 10.

"I think it really dawned on us when we went to Europe," Perry continued. "We started doing interviews and we realized some people had never heard of Aerosmith until that song came out."

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You take the vocals of one member of Oasis (in this instance, Noel Gallagher) and sprinkle it over a track by famed electronica duo, The Chemical Brothers, and what do you get? A tune for the ages, that's what.

Collaborating not once but twice - firstly on 1996's Setting Sun and then on 1999's Let Forever Be - the teaming of Noel and TCB might have seemed unusual at first but the result was more than well received.

Speaking to the Express back in 2015, ahead of the release of Chasing Yesterday (an album by Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds), Noel revealed that a track on the album originally started life 23 years earlier as part of Setting Sun:

"There's a song on this record that has taken me 23 years to finish. It's called Lock All the Doors. I gave a bit of it away to the Chemical Brothers in the '90s when we did Setting Sun and I always meant to finish it but I could never get a way for the verse to tie in with the chorus. But one afternoon, I was coming out of the Tesco Metro in Maida Vale and it just hit me, it came to me in a flash of inspiration."

Ever wondered how this collaboration came to be? Wonder no more...

"Where The Wild Roses Grow was written very much with Kylie in mind," Nick Cave was quoted as saying in Molly Meldrum Presents 50 Years of Rock in Australia. "I'd wanted to write a song for Kylie for many years. I had a quiet obsession with her for about six years. I wrote several songs for her, none of which I felt was appropriate to give her. It was only when I wrote this song, which is a dialogue between a killer and his victim, that I thought finally I'd written the right song for Kylie to sing. I sent the song to her and she replied the next day."

As for Kylie, she'd heard through the grapevine that Cave was interested in working with her years ealier.

"My experience with Nick Cave was probably a bit back-to-front, because I didn't know that much about him," Kylie told The Quietus. "But about six years before, my boyfriend at that time had said 'My friend Nick wants to make a record with you', but I didn't really know who he meant, and kind of said 'Oh OK, that's great', and thought nothing more about it...

So the first time I met Nick was actually at the studio in Melbourne. We'd spoken on the phone before that, but I hadn't met him, prior. And after working with him and recording this, ultimately a tragic song but this very tender, beautiful, sexual song, then I speed-read a biography on him. And then I realised, 'Wow, is this the same guy?!'"

The 2012 Grammys were a veritable feast for electronic dance music fans, and that's partly thanks to the Foo Fighters.

Bringing an element of rock to proceedings, Foo Fighters took to the stage to perform Rope - a track that Deadmau5 had remixed a year earlier - before Deadmau5 took to the decks and the respective artists worked their musical magic.

Speaking to MTV about the unlikely combination of EDM and rock music, Dave Grohl (the Foo Fighters frontman and proud owner of an impressive head of hair) had this to say:

"Well, Deadmau5 is maybe the only EDM artist I know because we did a bunch of festivals over the summer, and for whatever reason, he would be headlining over there while we were headlining over here. I guess people thought that our audiences would split, but our audiences are compatible in a way, because what he does... rocks."

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It was after playing together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 25th Anniversary Concert in 2009 that Lou Reed and Metallica decided they wanted to collaborate on an album.

Originally intended to be an album of unreleased Lou Reed tracks that Metallica were to re-record, the album eventually took on a life of its own with both artists contributing heavily throughout. Although it received mixed reviews from critics and fans alike, Reed was incredibly proud of the result.

“I think we did a sensual thing,” Reed told the Telegraph. “Music is magical, it can make you feel good, it can make you feel bad, and then you put some serious words to it... In my conceit, I thought what if Tennessee Williams had got a crack at this? Can’t it be A Streetcar Named Desire that’s a rock record? Why isn’t anyone doing it? Instead of writing the trash that is out there. I wanted to do something on that level, always. I came close on Berlin. Pretty close. But this one, for me, from beginning to end, this is it!”

“Turning your back on structure, you are opening up a world of possibilities,” Lars Ulrich (the drummer for Metallica) said in the same interview. “For Metallica, to have the luxury of that kind of impulsiveness with somebody who speaks our own language was the reward in itself.”