The Network

Let’s play a mind game real quick: Say you took a look at this album cover and had no idea who it was. The artwork looks like something that would have come off of a new wave record circa 1983, and when the guitars and synths come roaring in, you’re treated to the greatest squelchy melody that Mark Mothersbaugh never actually wrote. But the only catch here is that this was released in 2003, and the band is one of the greatest pop-punk acts to ever walk the Earth.

In between their career slump on Warning and American Idiot, this was Green Day’s excuse to make a creative detour and recharge their batteries. They knew they weren’t going to get anywhere with Cigarettes and Valentines, but by working in weird masks and giving themselves aliases, they had a perfect canopy for them to have some fun with something completely new, even if it’s clear by the lyrics that they’re still pulling from the Dookie playbook of masturbating and being a disaffected pre-teen.

While Billie Joe Armstrong tried his best to play it up like they were two different bands, everything was kept incredibly tongue-in-cheek in the years that followed, with Green Day even taking a break to make some more Network songs after Father of All in 2020. The whole thing sounds like a bizarro world version of the band, but if they managed to be born with keyboards instead of guitars, they wouldn’t have been half bad in an alternate dimension.

Box Car Racer

It’s incredibly tricky to keep any power trio together. Everyone needs to have equal weight when crafting songs, and even if one person is pulling the lion’s share of the responsibilities, it takes everyone to make them sound the way they do. So while Box Car Racer could have been a nice excuse for Tom DeLonge to get away from blink-182 for a bit, bringing in Travis Barker to play drums made this feel like an album that he was cheating on Mark Hoppus with halfway through their career.

Then again, the more aggressive feeling of these songs doesn’t really lend itself well to a band that was known for penis jokes. DeLonge had been listening to a lot of post-hardcore around this time, and while appearances by punk heavyweights like Tim Armstrong from Rancid did give a stamp of legitimacy to everything, it didn’t make it any easier for Hoppus to swallow, especially when he was asked to give a token appearance on the song ‘Elevator’ midway through the session.

Although the band tried their best to keep things together on their untitled record, all those wounds didn’t heal for a while, leading to DeLonge eventually leaving the band to work on his space rock science project, Angels and Airwaves. Blink-182 probably deserved a better fate than this, but out of every single thing that an ex-member has been a part of, Box Car Racer is the only thing that sounds anywhere close to their classic sound.

The Fireman

There is no feasible way for Paul McCartney to be anonymous if he tried. Ever since The Beatles hit it big, those brown eyes were stamped on the hearts of every girl who saw him perform, and while his music has changed a lot over the years, it’s hard to separate him from the happy-go-lucky member of the band who made whimsical pop songs. But, in truth, Macca is a freak when he wants to be, and The Fireman is the one outlet he has to get a little bit weird now and again.

While it was clear at the outset that McCartney was looking to make something uncommercial on his first albums, teaming up with Youth for Electric Arguments was the closest thing to a Macca side project as he could get. Compared to the safe and commercial records that he’s been releasing ever since Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, his work as The Fireman owes a lot more to projects like McCartney II, where he began toying with different genres to see what he could do.

McCartney III did get him back in touch with that DIY spirit, but perhaps The Fireman hasn’t had its final say just yet. After all, Youth is still producing great work, and Macca still seems to have a flair for all things weird, like on the Reimagined version of his last album, so all the pieces are there for both of them to make a new Fireman album with a couple of hits on it. Because for all the lacklustre albums McCartney released in the 1980s, it’s saying something when ‘Sing the Changes’ actually made it into his live set.

Temple of the Dog

The Seattle scene has always been kind to each other from day one. Not many people would expect the biggest names in rock music all being buddy-buddy with each other, but there was always room for Eddie Vedder to turn up on a Foo Fighters album if Dave Grohl asked or Mark Arm to appear on an Alice in Chains song. It was one big grunge family, so when they lost one of their own, Chris Cornell knew that they had to mourn like a family, too, when making Temple of the Dog.

Since Andy Wood was meant to be a star in Mother Love Bone, his passing shook the core of the scene, leading to Cornell getting the remaining members of the band together for a record. No one thought it was possible to replace Wood, but after Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament started working with Eddie Vedder in between these sessions, fans got a mix of Soundgarden’s trademark grit and Pearl Jam’s arena-ready riffs in one complete package.

None of the members were looking to make money off a release like this, but looking back, this is a nice time capsule to show the death of one band and the birth of another all in one go. Audioslave may have been Cornell’s second brush with being in a supergroup, but this is by far the purest record he has ever made.

Trio

The country world has always had trouble getting used to the idea of a supergroup. Many people make their living as solo artists in the Nashville system, and given the amount of personality that Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson had, no one cared who played bass for them or was rocking the drums behind them. In that industry, you looked out for yourself, but that didn’t mean that Linda Ronstadt couldn’t have some fun once she conquered the world of country-rock.

Ronstadt had already gone in a million different directions from Broadway to full-Spanish albums, but pairing her voice with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton gave us the all-female answer to a band like Crosby, Stills and Nash. Some of the songs may have been the kind of country tunes everyone knew and loved, but no one was ever going to be able to sing them like they could, especially Parton singing in that soulful croon that made her a national treasure all the way back in the 1960s.

Parton’s schedule may have prevented the band from going on much longer, and now that Ronstadt is fully retired, it’s never going to happen, but it’s nice to reminisce on the kind of magic that they had while they were all able to sing. The Highwaymen were a noble attempt at a country supergroup, but in this case, the females are able to do it much better than any of their cowboy counterparts.

Madvillain

So when discussing the idea of side projects, it’s hard to really gauge anything that MF DOOM ever touched. The man seemed to have an endless amount of aliases that he went under, so you didn’t know if one minute you were listening to MF DOOM, Viktor Vaughan, or the production stylings of King Geedorah. Even with all the confusion, there’s no one denying that Madvillainy is by far one of the greatest things that the villain has ever touched.

DOOM had already thought about working with Madlib for years before the album came to fruition, but the zany beats that the production genius put him on were a match made in comic book heaven. Since Madlib’s beats are a touch lazy and DOOM’s rhyming is always slightly offbeat, the whole thing is disorienting in the best way possible, especially when the piano starts going off at the beginning of ‘All Caps’ or when DOOM brings in a guest verse from Viktor Vaughan and ends up clowning on himself.

There’s clearly a bit of humour in this kind of delivery, but when people start dissecting the flow that DOOM has on every verse, this wasn’t just a dynamic duo working together. If we were to equate a rap collective to the comic book world that DOOM thrives in, this would be like if the Sinister Six all congealed into two distinct people.

Fort Minor

The biggest rule of any great band is compromise. Linkin Park may have prided themselves on all things metal and hip-hop, but that usually meant that Brad Delson wasn’t going to play any face-melting solos and Mike Shinoda was never going to insist on making a posse cut out of the blue. But after taking a break, Shinoda knew he needed to scratch that itch a little more when setting up his true hip-hop side project.

While a lot of the hooks on the record wouldn’t have felt out of place on Linkin Park’s Reanimation, this is one of the most personal records that Shinoda has ever made. Although Chester Bennington’s Dead by Sunrise did have its fair share of great moments as well, this was a great way for Shinoda to show pieces of his upbringing that the average rock fan wouldn’t have paid attention to, which is a godsend when he brings on people like Black Thought on the record.

Songs like ‘Where’d You Go’ may have eclipsed almost everything that the band did afterwards, but given that Shinoda made a handful of songs under the Fort Minor name later, it could be time for him to embrace his hip-hop persona once again. After all, the latest version of Linkin Park seems much more concerned with the metallic side of their sound, so why not get in touch with that alternative hip-hop side of things again?

Derek and the Dominos

By the end of the 1960s, Eric Clapton seemed allergic to staying in any one band for too long. He was a free agent in every sense of the word, and that meant playing with Cream, doing a handful of solos on George Harrison’s album, and eventually working with Blind Faith once his other supergroup went kaput. But since his flirtation with Harrison’s wife was a bit more than friendly, he knew that he needed to go the extra mile to get all those unrequited feelings out of his system.

Derek and the Dominos could have easily been another excuse for Clapton to play the best blues licks that he could, but in between the solos is a beautiful love letter to Patti Boyd. And while Clapton does have some soaring moments on guitar here and harmonises perfectly with Bobby Whitlock, the true MVP was his musical younger brother, Duane Allman, who lends his slide guitar all over this record.

Clapton’s efforts to woo Boyd were eventually successful when they married a few years following her divorce from Harrison, but Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is the perfect encapsulation of that pain. ‘Slowhand’ had been a guitar god for almost half his life at that point, but having no one to come home to was the kind of sentiment that many bluesmen he idolised knew all too well.

The Traveling Wilburys

Some of the greatest side projects aren’t really something that’s planned. Usually, a band comes together because they like playing together, and even if only a handful of people are listening, the purest songs are made from musicians who clearly enjoy each other’s company. But even for a project George Harrison considered his “other band”, The Traveling Wilburys had enough star power to give any other act a run for their money.

The whole point of the band was already an in-joke between Harrison and Jeff Lynne, but once it became a reality by accident, fans were more than happy to see their favourite rock and roll legends playing off each other. But what makes the band work is all their differences. Tom Petty’s American grit, Roy Orbison’s operatic voice, and Bob Dylan’s cunning wit were all great in their own right, but when they all combined, it felt like the kind of music that could have been written years before.

While their sense of style and age made them look like a bunch of dads in the late 1980s that happened to be musical legends, it’s not like they didn’t know how to write a tune together. The idea of rock and roll reaching middle age might have been a scary thought for some people, but it turns out when you get five of the greatest musicians of rock’s golden age together, they tend to write some fairly decent music.

Gorillaz

Out of every other band on this list, Gorillaz seems to belong in a class by itself. First of all, the band isn’t technically real, and their lineup remains fluid with every single project that Damon Albarn thinks up. Then again, there is still an entire generation of kids who think that this virtual band is one of the best acts going today who probably don’t even have a clue what Blur was all about back in their Britpop heyday.

Albarn could have easily skated by on his Britpop royalties for the rest of his life, but by making a fictional band and bringing in elements of trip-hop, rap, and rock and roll, he created one of the quintessential alternative bands. Compared to every other major release sounding like an artist’s personal take on the world, this is like booting up a new season of your favourite TV show every time a record starts, like the long journey through dark landscapes on Demon Days or the environmental haze of Plastic Beach.

More than anything, Albarn’s model for Gorillaz feels like the best example of where rock and roll could go beyond the band setup. He was still making the same kind of music that he did when he was with Blur, but he figured out there was an endless amount of possibilities when you give in to the digital side of things.