David Gilmour plays guest guitar on this magnificent version of his own song Comfortably Numb by Ice-T’s thrash metal band Body Count.

I don’t know how much crossover there is between fans of veteran progsters Pink Floyd and fans of West Coast rapper Ice-T. Almost none, I’d guess.

But here’s Mr T, best known for his song Cop Killer – and his long-running acting role in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – singing the Floyd favourite Comfortably Numb with his thrash metal band Body Count.

And who is that drowning the song in glorious liquid guitar but the familiar figure of David Gilmour himself. And you know what? It’s fantastic!

It’s also a big surprise because it’s historically been almost impossible to get Pink Floyd to agree to anything because Gilmour and Roger Waters are not on speaking terms and disagree on just about everything from reuniting Floyd to the Middle East conflict.

Even without that, Floyd are a band who never allow their music to be used for ads, or to be sampled. And with Gilmour having just sold his end of the rights (apart from songwriting royalties) for a cool $400 million, he hardly needs to change his mind.

So when Ice-T first approached the band’s publisher for permission to cover the song on Body Count’s latest album, Merciless, he was immediately knocked back.

Undaunted, he went straight to Gilmour and Waters, through their respective managers, and the former immediately agreed while the latter agreed once he had heard the vocals by Ice-T – making it a rare example of the duo being in agreement over anything.

On top of that, Gilmour agreed – or requested – to play guitar on the track himself, and to appear in this official video.

Ice-T says he was not familiar with Floyd’s music when growing up in a black neighbourhood in LA (he’d been born on the East Coast in New Jersey but moved west when both parents died), but had always liked the bassline of Comfortably Numb because it reminded him of Giorgio Moroder’s score for Scarface.