Those who follow the career of Britain's leading male ballet dancer, Edward Watson, are used to being wrong-stepped. Whether Watson is playing Kafka's giant bug on stage in The Metamorphosis or being controversially proclaimed "superhuman" in Royal Ballet publicity material in 2007, he is tricky to predict. And now the redheaded dancer from Dartford has released a music video in which he appears to be singing as well as dancing.

The video, released exclusively to the Observer, is the result of a collaboration with the band The Feeling, who asked him to interpret a song from their fourth album, out this month. Shot in an aircraft hangar in north London on Watson's day off, the arresting video shows him moving and miming to the words of the title track, Boy Cried Wolf.

"Initially, I wasn't sure about Ed being filmed singing, but then I thought I would see what happened and how it looked," said Dan Gillespie Sells, singer with The Feeling. "It was bizarre seeing someone miming to my lyric."

The band asked Watson to collaborate when Gillespie Sells met him at a concert. "We were determined not to appear in our own video for once. It is so boring," he said, adding that he felt that the band had often been pressurised to put themselves in front of the camera.

Watson, speaking between dance class sessions at Covent Garden, said he had grabbed the chance to interpret the song's lyric in movement. "It was great to work with choreographer Arthur Pita again too," said Watson. The dancer and Pita created the Olivier award-winning Royal Ballet adaptation of Franz Kafka's 1915 novella Metamorphosis in 2011.

"I had no idea Edward would do such a good job of interpreting the music and the emotion," said Gillespie Sells. "I suppose I should have done, because I have seen him dancing. We had kept this track very much to ourselves, so it was great to have someone else react to it finally, and to the idea behind it; the idea of a lost boy."

The Feeling, who had a first hit single, Fill My Little World, in 2005 and were nominated for a Brit Award in 2007, are a five-piece band: Gillespie Sells performs alongside Paul Stewart, brothers Ciaran and Kevin Jeremiah and bassist Richard Jones, husband of Sophie Ellis Bextor.

"Many of our other videos have been pretty awful, convoluted and silly, except the one we did for our early single, Sewn, directed by Caswell Coggins. He brought out our darker side too," said Gillespie Sells. "The bright and bouncy side of our music really does not need to be pushed forward. What I love about great pop music is that although it might sound accessible, there is usually something darker there in the lyrics. Even bubbly and sugary songs, say by the Carpenters or even Abba, have sad lyrics and a dark heart."