The Big Lie

In the early 2000s, the hip hop group Silibil N’ Brains seemed like they were on the brink of becoming very famous. They had a record deal with Sony, had been on MTV, and were talking about making a TV show. But they weren’t who they said they were. Gavin Bain's book is California Schemin'. Join our newsletter by 2/28/26 to be entered to win a free year of Criminal Plus: ⁠⁠thisiscriminal.com/newsletter⁠⁠. (Additional rules apply.) Say hello on ⁠Facebook⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:09Speaker 02

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Chloe Mal. We talk all about her taking on the top job at Vogue, finding her personal style, and her favorite lunch order in the iconic Conde Nast cafeteria. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Well, let's just jump right in and let's just start with you introducing yourself.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  And it's not a trick question. It's like a very simple, just what's your name?

• 2:04Speaker 04

  You've just started off with the hardest question.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  This is Gavin Bain, but for years, he went by another name. It all started in 1998, on his first day of college in Dundee, Scotland, when he met another student named Billy Boyd.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  I was running late. I was skateboarding in and I saw this guy standing outside the campus just nonchalantly. I mean, I'm rushing. This probably sums up both of our personalities. I'm rushing. I'm thinking, God, you've messed us up already, you know? And he's just standing there. He's got like a baggy jeans on, hair corn rolled, a Hanson t-shirt. I don't know why he's wearing that. But he's listening. He's just got his headphones on and I kind of skipped past him and stopped. And I'm like, hey, have I got the time wrong? Why aren't you inside? And he's got Nirvana. I can hear that that's blasting. He's got it so loud. And he looks at me and he's like, what do you want?

• 3:06Speaker 04

  He's so offended that I've interrupted Nirvana. And then I kind of rush off in and I'm like, oh, man, first person I meet looks really cool. And I've just like made an enemy out of the first person. But then I get lost. I go into the wrong class.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  After a while, he managed to find the right classroom. He was 45 minutes late and the only seat left was next to the guy he'd met out front.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  And when we were in close range, he was looking at my bag and I was looking at his bag. And I had Rage Against the Machine, Cypress Hill, Wu-Tang Clan badges on my backpack. And he had the same, but he had Korn and he had some other like metal bands mixed in with Tribe Called Quest. So it was like, together we covered the entire gamut of the coolest bands in the world at the time. And he had Limp Bizkit. So, yeah, we just kind of cracked it off. We started to talk in quotes from kind of rap films.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  From the early 90s, yeah, we were just, it was just a straight in with a flow. And by lunchtime, we were freestyling quietly at first. And then by the end of lunchtime, we had performed our first gig in a way. Everyone was kind of gathered around us and we were, we were rappers. And on the way home, I turned to him and said, hey, do you want to be a rap group? And he was like, that's a fucking literally. And that was it. We were a rap group.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  They practiced all the time, competing with each other to make up the smartest and funniest lyrics they could on the spot.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  So we created a game called Porcupine. And that was a way for us to battle rap each other, but then also like throw each other words. And then we'd just start freestyling off the word.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  And why did you call it Porcupine?

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Because some people think that's a hard word to rhyme with. But when someone throws a hard word like Porcupine, it can make the game funner. But also, we would use it as like, that would be the last word to try, uh, beat the other person with. You couldn't win the game unless you ended with something to do with a Porcupine.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  They started performing gigs in bars near their college in Dundee. And their friend Oscar joined the group. Gavin says their main influence was, quote, "the best white rapper we could think of, Eminem." Eminem released his major label debut album, The Slim Shady LP, in 1999, not long after Gavin and Billy had met. One reviewer wrote that "his lyrics are so clever that he makes murder sound funny."

• 5:52Speaker 03

  One night Gavin, Billy and Oscar stayed out very late and ended up going back to Gavin's room. Oscar got on the computer.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  I mean, the internet was kind of early days, so he just randomly found this thing that was on a website called undergroundhiphop.com. And it was just this kind of flyer, this poster for, are you the next Eminem? And as soon as we saw it, we thought, yeah, of course we are.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  A record label is holding open auditions in London. Gavin, Billy and Oscar took a 13-hour bus ride there, playing Porcupine most of the way. But when they finally got to the audition, the line to get in went around the block twice.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  It was quite apparent there's just no way we're going to get in because there's far too many people here. And so what we decided to do was to go and ask if we could battle people for their spot. So knowing hip-hop people, once you get challenged to battle, you can't say no. If you say no, you essentially step aside and let us just take your spot. So at first, most people would say yes, and then we started battling. And eventually, after you beat like 10, 15, 20 people, the seas part, you know? And by the time we got to the front, there was so many people behind us kind of rooting for us, like, oh, my God, these guys actually are like eminent.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  So the feeling outside is that these three Scottish kids are just going to walk this. And so our confidence is so high. Well, as soon as we get in and we're going past these dance studios, and it starts to become very commercialized, and we start to feel like, mm, you know? So we're kind of shrinking as we got closer and closer and closer.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  When they got to the audition room, they handed the sound guy their CD. Gavin remembers there were X's on the floor for them to stand on, in front of a table with three English talent scouts from the record label, A and Rs, sitting behind it.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  And then we said to press play, and the guy presses play, but he hasn't turned the volume up. So by the time the beat comes in, it's already like halfway into the song. So we're like, no, no, no, please put it back to the start. And now we're just like shaking because it's all going wrong. So then we start to rap.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  What can I do, I'm the impact of a bad drum? I'm smacking my spot, the rapper's acting handsome. I'm out of the mix, starting with God. It's like I speak for his mind, and after it lands, you get an ice cream for that.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  And as soon as we start to rap, you know, you're hyper aware of the situation. You're so focused on everything. You're looking around the room. And when you're a rapper, you're constantly making eye contact with people because you feed off their, you know, their response. And the three, these A and Rs, were just like kind of looking at each other at the side of their eyes and kind of trying to stop themselves from laughing.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  And then about like thirty seconds in, thirty, forty seconds into my rap verse, they just kind of put their hand up to the sound guy and said, "Cool, cool, cool, that's enough."

• 8:57Speaker 04

  And then they just were kind of like laughing and one of them said, "Is this a joke? You know, did Dave put you up to this?" And we said, "No, this is serious." They said, "This is a cool comedy act, but not quite what we're looking for." You know, Scotland is Groundskeeper Willie, it's Braveheart, it's Sean Connery. You know, it's drunk ginger people in skirts. Scotland is not rap. We can't sell that.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Gavin says they all went straight to a pub after that. And while they were there, they decided to go and try to see someone else before they left London.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  I just thought, "They don't get it." But so then, "Let's go, let's go somewhere to someone who gets it." And there was a guy called Dave Loeb, who ran Wordplay and the biggest hip-hop magazine in Europe, Hip-Hop Connection. So I thought, "Let's go and see Dave Loeb and we'll ask him." You know, so we go there. It's kind of like this security, you've got to get past a security gate. So we wait for ages. Eventually, a guy bringing records comes up the road. He goes in, we sneak in. We get to their office. Billy's trying to flirt with the lady on reception to buy his time to get in until he walks past. And eventually he walks past and we're like, "Dave, you know..." And we kind of like, just don't want to leave.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  We're like, "Look, it's taken a lot to get here. We're not leaving until you give us like five minutes." So eventually, we go into his office and we're like, "Here's our songs. Like, let us know what you think." And he's like, "All right." You know, so he starts playing the CD. And he plays the first beat and he's like, "Oh, God, yeah." And you can see, he really loves the beat. And then as soon as one of us starts rapping, he's like, "Nah," skips to the next one. And then the same thing, he's like, loves the beat and then skips to the next one as soon as vocals come in. And the third one, he loves the beat again as soon as we start rapping. Pills the CD out and he said, "Don't make me say it." And I said, "No, say it." And he's like, "You fucking sound like the rapping proclamers."

• 11:02Speaker 04

  And the proclaimers are great. They're an amazing Scottish group. They sing that classic song, "I Will Walk 500 Miles." And their Scottish heritage, but he's meaning it in a, that they're a bit of a joke. You know, like no rapper would ever listen to that, you know?

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Gavin says that he and Billy didn't say a word to each other for the whole 13-hour bus ride back home.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  I kind of was really just trying not to cry. And a part of me was like, they are right, though. You know, I saw that if your job is in marketing at the time, and hip hop was all about your credibility, what you've gone through, you know, like what street you come from, you know, like the branding of rap in America was so powerful. And Britain didn't quite have that yet. And Scotland definitely didn't have that, you know? So I, so they were right. They can't sell it. So I understood that. But then that left me with the predicament of, well, then we can never do this.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  When Gavin got back home, he started spending more and more time alone, and he wasn't sleeping well. And then one night, he was watching TV and a movie came on.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  A film that I'd seen loads from the eighties called "The Secret of My Success." And there's a scene where Michael J. Fox's character, he's trying to get this job, but he's a little small-town boy, and he's trying to make it in the New York City. And he's just getting turned down everywhere, you know, because he doesn't fit. They can't, he doesn't fit in their world. And then he, he goes into this one office to get changed because he's not wearing the right thing, and he's trying to like go to this meeting that he's got. And in this office, the phone rings, and he picks it up, and the person says, is that, you know, so-and-so? And he goes, yeah. And he, and he starts to just pretend he is. And he gets so empowered that, that he can be that person.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  And I think like, well, why don't we just become someone else?

• 13:10Speaker 03

  If being Scottish was the problem, then they'd become Americans. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

• 13:42Speaker 03

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• 15:44Speaker 03

  Gavin Bain started recording himself rapping his lyrics with an American accent, just to see what it sounded like.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  So the first few times sober that I tried to record myself in the American accent, it didn't sound good. It sounded fake. Like, the way the tongue moves isn't the same as when you switch to another accent. So I was struggling with that, and then I was thinking too much when I was sober. So then I took certain uppers with certain downers, like, to get, knock myself off centre, so I could stop being hypercritical about myself and allow myself to flow. And it sounded so good. It sounded real. It sounded like this kid is from California and he sounds like Eminem. I liked the song so much that I took it to a party. My friend Brian was throwing this big party, and he used to throw like really

• 16:36Speaker 04

  cool parties. So he'd have like DJs and everyone who was into hip-hop in the area would be there. And so I go into the party, and I gave our DJ at the time, Skinny, I gave him the CD, and I was like, "I'll play this. It's a new American rapper I just heard. Play this." You know, and he played it right after an Eminem song. And everyone was dancing and loving the Eminem track, and then he played that song. And nobody, like, no one batted an eye.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  They were like, "Is this the new Eminem track or something?" Like, they just thought it was Eminem, or they thought it was an American rapper. And so I'm watching the room, and then I look at Billy, and he looks over to me, because he knows they're my lyrics, and he's just like, mind-blown. He's like, "Oh my God, it sounds real."

• 17:27Speaker 03

  And then Gavin told Billy about his idea to pretend to be Americans. Gavin says that Billy said no, but he did want to see what it sounded like. And he experimented with recording some of their songs in an American accent.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  A few weeks later, their friend Brian, who had thrown the party where Gavin played the song, died in an accident. Gavin and Billy drove to the funeral together. On the way there, they listened to the radio. And then, one of their songs came on, with them rapping in American accents. Gavin says they each thought they were playing a trick on each other. But when they got to the funeral, Brian's brother told them that before Brian died, he'd entered the song into a national radio competition as a surprise, and that it had won.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  We'd beaten every single rock band, every single folk act, every pop act. We won it. And the song was getting airplay. And Billy finally kind of turned around and said, "Okay, let's do this for Brian." And so, we were on our way.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Someone from Sony had heard the song on the radio and had gotten in touch to see if they could meet with Gavin and Billy in person in London in two weeks.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  So we had two weeks to perfect the accent. And so, we made this agreement that we would speak to each other all the time in American accent. Everything we did, we did in American accent. We would have sex in American accents.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Wait, what?

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Which our girlfriends thought was really fucking annoying.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  And...

• 19:15Speaker 03

  That does seem really bad. I'm surprised they stayed with you.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  I'm surprised as well.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  But you only... Did you know anything about Americans besides the movies? I mean, what did you think Americans?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  We were, yeah, no, we were like, we'd just grown up watching American movies. We loved American stand-up comedy. And we just took a whole bunch of different characters and we mashed them together.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Gavin says they wanted to study interviews with American rap stars and skaters. But all they could really get their hands on in time was a DVD of Friends and a few American movies. Gavin started watching Back to the Future over and over again, until he could say Michael J. Fox's lines along with him. He also watched a lot of Good Will Hunting and studied Matt Damon's character. Billy studied Matthew Perry's character in Friends, Chandler. They watched as many episodes as they could. Gavin says they paused it whenever Chandler said something funny and then tried to repeat it. They came up with new names for their American personas.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Gavin Bain became Brains McLeod and Billy Boyd became Syllable. They called their group Syllable and Brains. They decided they would be from California. They picked a city called Hemet where Billy actually had family. Billy bleached his hair. Gavin tried out a trucker hat. They both started wearing more colorful clothes. And at the end of the two weeks, they got back on the 13-hour bus ride to London. The first place they went was Sony Records to meet with Dougie Bruce, the scout who had heard their song on the radio.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  And as soon as he sits down, he's like, aye, all right, boys. You know, and he's got this broad Glaswegian accent. The first person, the first A and R that interviews us is Scottish. We're screwed at that point because when someone Scottish is speaking to someone Scottish, you start to kind of like, you join, you know? And so we were talking and we were both finding it very difficult not to say Scottish words. And then eventually he said something. He said, aye, and Bill went straight back with, I can, which is I know in Scotland. And two Americans would never know to say, I can. It's in the way that Bill said it.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  And as soon as we said that, he looked straight at Billy and then he looked at me and it was like, he knows. You know, so we felt like everything that we were saying, he was like, where are you boys actually from? And the way he said actually was like, he knows. This is, you know, we're done here, basically. And when we left that outside of the Sony building, I grabbed Bill and I said, This isn't gonna work if we're half-assed. Like, we need to be in, all in, like, twenty-four seven. We need to become the characters if this is gonna work. Let's just be the craziest version of who we wanna be. Turn it all up to eleven and let's just go, you know?

• 22:38Speaker 04

  And so as soon as we went to do a show that night, we kicking the door, you know, we started stomping around, like, we own the place. We did this crazy stage show, chasing each other around. We're vomiting on the front row. And then when we came offstage, this guy came up to us and he was like, uh, where are you guys from? Now, earlier in the morning, when Dougie Bruce asked us, where are you guys from? We both answered at the same time because we hadn't even got our story in line. We were just so excited that we didn't even, you know, run through what our story is. So, in the morning, I said Huntington and Billy said Hammett. At night, um, with Chris Rock at Island Records,

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Billy says Huntington and I say Hammett at the same time. And this guy is just looking at us like, cool! And he didn't, he didn't care. And he was like, right, here's my, here's my card. He slid his card to us. And he's like, come and see me on Monday morning.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  When you say you were like banging and stomping, is that something you thought like Americans did? Like, they just kinda take the room?

• 23:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, yeah. If you watch, if you've grown up watching rap music videos, we just basically became like our, our favorite rappers in those videos, you know? But then in person with people, we would switch to characters from like friends, you know? And so we'd play, Bill would play a version of Joey and I would play a version of Ross or Chandler. Because those are likeable characters, you know? So we knew that when we're around people, don't be banging around. And also that's, those characters are actually closer to our personalities.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  I mean, it really feels like two opposite ends of the spectrum to be Eminem on stage and Chandler off the stage. I don't really know how those two meld.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  You know, every artist I've ever met has been one person onstage and offstage, a completely different person. I'd seen loads of interviews with members of Slipknot and members of Korn and all these kind of dangerous kind of rock bands, but actually they were like real sweethearts when the masks were off, you know?

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Gavin says that on Monday morning, after going over their story again, he and Billy went to Island Records to meet with Chris, the scout who'd given them his card at their show.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Now that we're American, he was selling himself to us. So it was a big change, you know? And so he was like, "Tell me everything about you guys." And that's a different question from where are you from, or what do you do, or you know, because that you kind of feel like you're being examined. So Bill and I just started telling the story like, "Look, we're from this, this kind of cookie cutter neighborhood in Hemet." And that, you know, we met each other at the San Diego Vans Tour because we had known a lot about that tour specifically because of the bands that played. We were really interested in that. We had the DVD about it. So we actually knew some things that happened. And we knew that there was a battle rap competition that happened in

• 25:54Speaker 04

  the parking lot. And that, so then we kind of incorporated that. And I said that, yeah, we met at that, at the San Diego War Tour. And then we moved to Huntington Beach, slept on the beach, under the pier. You know, like, this is just like versions of Chili Pepper songs now coming out, you know? And then we got this job in this skate store. And then, you know, we became a rap group, came over here, ran out of money. And now you're going to give us a record deal and let the fun continue. And the way it just flowed off the tongue, I was cutting each other off. It was like we were rapping.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Gavin says Chris seemed to believe the story completely. Gavin remembers that he even told them it was beautiful.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  And he was like, "You've got to do that thing that you did the other night," you know? Because basically, we had this thing that if anyone heckled us from our audience, we would just like pick that person out and then we would, you know, just tear into that person with freestyles. So he called all the A and Rs into the main kind of open area. And he was like, "All right, do that thing now."

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Go and he's basically telling us to go around the room just ripping into everyone. And I was like, oh my God, you know, so like this is it. And so we just started doing it, you know? Look at this guy in the fake Adidas. Look at his beard. Who does he think he is? Jesus, you know, and just move on to the next person. Eventually we get to Chris. Everyone's like falling around laughing. We get to Chris and we start making fat jokes and Chris is quite fat. And Chris was not laughing at this one. He started to look furious that the joke had now been turned on him. But it's all of his staff were in tears laughing. And then he, they, they realized he wasn't laughing and they all stopped. And then he just burst out laughing and we knew that we've got it.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Then we just felt like, God, this is easy.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  But Gavin says they couldn't just sign with the record company. First they needed a lawyer and a manager. Chris got them a meeting with one of the biggest music managers in London, a man named Jonathan Shalit.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  This guy is the Simon Cowell, like the, the nicer version of Simon Cowell, you know? So he just gets straight to the point and he's like, what do you want? And at this point, we had no money. We had no money left. So as soon as he said, what do you need? I don't know why I said it. Maybe it was like a line in another movie, but I said, we don't go out of bed. In an American accent, we don't get out of bed for anything less than 70K. And Billy looked at me like, what the holy crap, you know?

• 28:31Speaker 03

  But Jonathan Shalit said, okay.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  And all of a sudden we had 70,000. For a couple of days after that, we kept going to the bank machine to see if the money was in. And every day that it wasn't in, we felt like, ah, okay. This, this isn't really real. And then the day that the money was in, we'd both never seen that amount of money in our bank accounts. And I think that changed something a little bit because my head started to be like, hmm.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  What if, is this a crime? And Billy was like, what if, is this our money? You know? That didn't stop us from immediately going out and getting blurted drunk and having the best week of our lives, getting hammered every single day.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Jonathan Shalit's office helped get them set up in a big apartment and arranged for them to play at showcases around London, trying to see what kinds of offers came in. And it worked. After about three months, they made a deal with Sony. They went into the office to sign the contract. Gavin remembers it was in a big boardroom, with staff there to help them celebrate. There was champagne. And people kept coming up to them to ask them about the stories they'd heard about them.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  A big part of the story was that we became very close friends with D12 and Eminem, which is quite a stretch. But when you're like kind of improvising and acting, the whole point is the same as freestyle, is to make little links and then let them grow and let them grow. So on that day, we're in Sony and this girl comes up and she's like, no way, you guys are from Huntington Beach? And I'm like, yeah, yeah. She's like, that's where I'm from. And I'm like, oh no. And she's like, I heard you worked in a skate store. Which one? I'm like, oh no.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  And I say Slam City Skates. And she's like, no way, I work at Slam, I work there as well. And I'm like, oh my God, no. And I'm just dying inside, so I'm smiling. I'm like, no way, that's cool. But like, I'm dying now and I'm starting to sweat. I'm looking around for Bill, like, I need help here.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  By this time Gavin and Billy had developed a system for whenever anybody started asking questions about their lives in America. They called it Lead and Recover.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  So the Lead Recover system is that one listens and one answers. And so if I'm answering and Bill's listening and I start to stutter or make a mistake, Bill jumps in and either takes the person who's asking questions and takes them on a different direction, or if it's getting real bad can just, you know, throw a hand grenade in or do something to kind of distract so that they forget what they were asking. So but then on this day, people are pulling Bill this way and we're not together. So we're not an earshot of each other. So I'm now done. I can feel the breathing, my breathing starting to be kind of like, you're about to tell that

• 31:53Speaker 04

  I'm worried here, you know, and I'm holding on for dear life. And then Bill turns and looks and sees my face and he knows. And so Bill knocks a Mariah Carey poster, a frame, like with a, you know, a record in it, off the wall and it cracks. And then everyone turns and I sneak out of the room and go to the toilet, went down to the toilet, vomited, kind of washed my face. But by the time I went back in, Bill had kind of just got everyone going again and, you know, she kind of forgot that line of questioning.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Gavin says they signed the contract, as Syllable and Brains, for £50,000 upfront and £300,000 more when they released more material and their album. Did you have a plan? Did you say, okay, well, we'll go for this long or we'll make this much money and then we'll, we'll tell people who we really are?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  I remember in Dundee in Scotland saying, look, this is what we do. We go down, we get a record deal. You know, we'd blow up overnight, get a number one record, obviously. As soon as I hear someone singing my words back to me, I'm good. I can walk from it. And then we go on Jonathan Ross's TV show, because Jonathan Ross is like the king of late night TV here. And so we'll go on Jonathan Ross's show and then we'll just go, you know what, Jonathan? We're not American. We've never been to America. We're Scottish. And then we'd make a point to be like, we always had talent. Why did we need to do this?

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Not long after they signed the contract, Gavin and Billy got an appearance on the UK version of one of MTV's most popular shows, Total Request Live.

• 33:49Speaker 06

  Please put hands together for Syllable and Brains.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  What's up? What's up? What's up?

• 33:55Speaker 06

  Shut up. Thanks for coming on, guys.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  You guys are great.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  Shut up. Okay, okay. Boys, your spanking new music.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  Spanking.

• 34:03Speaker 06

  How would you describe your sound?

• 34:04Speaker 05

  Spanking. Spankingly new. Spankingly new. For comedy, humor. New thing. Excellent.

• 34:12Speaker 06

  Well, you did a performance for us to try and drag this back from the edge of despair. Yes, I did. Your Mums is what it was called. Well, it wasn't called My Moms. Just Your Mums. In general.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  Moms in general, yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Don't bring my mum into it, not on my own show. Let's take a look at it. It's very entertaining.

• 34:26Speaker 05

  Check it out.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  And then, on live TV, the host asked them another question.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  So, were you guys from? Planet Zordon. Really, I'll confirm. We were adopted by aliens when we were kids and we travelled around the solar system ever since then.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Gavin says that when he got home that night, he Googled Syllable and Brains to see what people were saying about them.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  And there was this website and these forums that were like, what's Gavin Bane doing? All these people who knew us in our life were online going, wait, I know, like, what's going on?

• 35:09Speaker 03

  One comment read, "I had a fight with Gavin Bain in a chip shop once. Wasn't in America, though. This was Dundee. Your man's a Scot."

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Gavin says he and Billy got called into Sony's offices the next day. But when they got there, nobody said anything about them being from Scotland. Instead, Gavin says, they got the news that MTV wanted them to come back soon and that there was even some interest in them hosting their own show. They started working on show ideas and going to meetings with TV producers. Gavin says Sony decided to wait to release Syllable and Brains' first single until something happened with the TV show. And in the meantime, Syllable and Brains was touring as much as they could.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  There was a lot of drinking every single night. Waking up the next morning, having two hours of not drinking and then back on it. And Bill and I at this point were starting to do backflips off drum risers. We kept trying to up our stage show and it was kind of getting dangerous.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  By the end of the tour, they were exhausted. Gavin says he went to bed as soon as they got home at 6:00 AM.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  And we've got like, you know, I think I sleep for one hour and then my phone goes at 7:00 AM. And it's one of the managers at Jonathan Schall's office. And he goes, "I've got good news and bad news for you. The bad news is you're not coming off tour. The good news is you're going on tour with your best friends." And I'm thinking, "Who's our best friends?" And I'm like, "Who?" And he's like, "M and M and D12." And so I'm like, I'm just like, "Oh, my God, no. Like, how are we going to pull this off?"

• 37:09Speaker 03

  We'll be right back.

• 37:23Speaker 03

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• 39:27Speaker 03

  A couple of hours after Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd heard they'd be going on tour with Eminem and his group D12, a tour bus picked them up to take them to the first venue. They were excited, but Gavin says they also spent the whole ride trying to figure out what to do.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  You know, anyone sees us for five minutes around them, they're going to see unfamiliarity. Like, this will be over as soon as we walk out in front of them. This will be over. So it was just like, let's just see how it goes. Maybe we can hide. Maybe we can stay away from them. And so then we hold on to that. We think, all right, we'll just hide from them. We will not be in the same place they're in. We come out of our tour bus, we walk right in, there's D12 on stage, sound checking. And we're like, shit. And then we turn to go, but all of the loading's happening, so we can't get past the loading. The other side, all of our management team is

• 40:25Speaker 04

  there. Next to them is a camera crew who are there for MTV filming D12 and Eminem over on this promotional tour. So there's nowhere to go. So like, the clock was just ticking in my head, like, tick, tick, and they're sound checking purple pills. And we know when the song ends, and it's just a countdown to like, them walking past us. And so me and Bill are like, looking at each other, not saying a word, but we're having a crazy conversation with our eyes. And as soon as the song finishes, I look at Bill and we're kind of like, yeah, fuck it, let's go. And then we just stomp on the stage, like, we own the place. We're like, what up? You know, like, start high

• 41:08Speaker 04

  fiving them. I high five Bizarre, and I'm like, holding him. I'm like, kind of grabbed my hands into his belly and back, so that he can't pull away from me. So that it looks like he's hugging me tightly. And I'm like, ah, you know. And I think from a distance, it probably just looked like this was a warm embrace from friends. But up close, we could see their faces were like, they were going through, who are these guys again?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  But Gavin says they just went with it. They high-fived again and agreed to meet up after the show. Gavin and Billy had never performed on such a large stage, in front of such a huge audience, almost 5,000 people. Gavin says he'd never sweated so much as he did when they went onstage that night, and that, once they got going, he never wanted it to end. They ended the set with a song they hoped would become their hit single, called "Losers."

• 42:23Speaker 03

  The crowd went wild for them. It was everything they had dreamed of. And then, after the show, Gavin and Billy's lawyer pulled them aside.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  And he was like, "You're Gavin and you're Billy, and I know it all."

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Gavin and Billy's lawyer had been asking them for their American passports for months and months. They always told him they couldn't find them, and that they'd get them to him later. And then he saw the posts on the Hip-Hop Forum after their appearance on MTV, saying that they were actually Gavin and Billy from Scotland, not Syllable and Brains from California.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  And so he was really angry, and he was like, "You need to come with me. We need to speak to the label. I'm gonna pull you off the tour. We'll go to the label, we'll talk it through." And we're just like, "Get lost." We're like, "What are you smoking?" You know, we're just making out that he's completely crazy. But then he says this thing to us where he's like, I think he got Bill on this one. He was like, "Look, you didn't need to do this. You're so good. Why are you doing this?" And I just laughed, and Bill walked into the changing room. And Eminem was about to come down the hallway with a whole camera crew from MTV. And Tim, our lawyer, was like, "Okay, so you're best friends with this guy? Okay, let me ask him quick."

• 43:44Speaker 04

  And he was gonna stop Eminem and ask him, and I was trying to call his bluff. I was like, "Yeah, ask him." And then he got closer and closer and closer, and I just freaked out. And I just ran in the dressing room, which to Tim said, "You're right," and yeah. So that was very, that was very close, but Tim didn't go to the label, and we didn't get caught. It just went on and on and on.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Billy and Gavin kept touring and playing packed shows. And their MySpace page started filling up with messages from fans. They got an endorsement deal with a soda company. Gavin had developed a stomach ulcer.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  And it just, it was getting so big, you know, to the point where, within two years, this is two years now, we haven't released a record. We've got all this stuff going for us and we haven't released a record. The amount of money that's been spent on us at this point is over a million.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Gavin was barely talking to his family. He says it took him out of character. His girlfriend in Dundee had broken up with him after a visit during which he'd mostly spoken in an American accent. And he and Billy were drifting apart. Billy was going back to Scotland more often to visit his girlfriend. And then he found out she was pregnant. Gavin says everything changed after that. Billy had had enough.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  So, basically, we have this big fight. And it's one of those fights you can't come back from, I'm afraid. So, essentially, the grip was over. We didn't get caught. And the fact that the grip was over was kind of a bit of a blessing. Because there was a clause in the contract that if the band breaks up before the record comes out, then you don't have to pay the money back. And so, we essentially got away with not having to pay that money back.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  I mean, how did you announce it to the fans?

• 45:49Speaker 04

  We kind of just didn't. We just kind of went away. We went quiet.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Billy went back to Scotland and eventually got a job on an oil rig. Gavin stayed in London and tried to make it work without Billy. But Sony stopped taking Gavin's calls. He says it was hard to give up his American persona. He worked odd jobs. For a while, he worked for an American skate shoe company. He spoke in an American accent when he applied, and they thought he was American.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  And then, a couple of years after Syllable and Brains split up, Gavin heard that one of his closest friends from childhood had cancer. And he decided to put on a show.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  And then do it as a comeback show and make that money and then give Ivan the money for his treatment.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  But right before Gavin was about to go on stage, he heard that his friend had died.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  And so when I walked out on stage, I kind of just looked out and my band were playing the intro of the song. And I was missing keys to go into the first lyrics. And I tried to go into lyrics, I just couldn't get anything out. I was just like crying. And so I stopped the music and I turned to the crowd and I said, "I'm not Brains, I'm Gavin. And I've never been to America."

• 47:18Speaker 04

  And so we got through that show, I came off. But I just went to the dressing room and kind of couldn't really deal with everyone wanting to ask more questions. So I hid in there until everyone was gone and I snuck out the back. And when I snuck out the back, there was about 200 kids. And I always thought they wanted more answers, like what happened, you know? And I just kind of started to apologize. And then they started to rap my lyrics back to me.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  They cared only about the lyrics.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Billy and Gavin didn't speak for years. But in 2012, they briefly got back together to record and finally release a Syllable and Brains album. They called it Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Gavin went on to have his own music career. He's working on an album right now.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  So yeah, I'm just having a lot of fun.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  And you're doing it all now in a Scottish accent?

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, or whatever accent hits me.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Zajico, Lily Clark, Lena Silson, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. Gavin Bain has written a book about syllable and brains. It's called California Scheman. A movie about their story with the same title is coming out this year.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes photos and videos, and you'll be able to talk directly with us and other Criminal listeners. Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  This is Criminal.

• 50:14Speaker 01

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