The Big Lie

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Well let's just jump right in and let's just start with you introducing yourself. Oh god. And it's not a trick quite it's like a very simple just what's your name? That's you just started off with the hardest question. 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.

I was uh running late. I was skateboarding in and I saw this guy standing outside the campus just nonchalantly. I mean I'm Russian. 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 bag of jeans on, hair corn rolled, A hanson t-shirt. I don't know why.

But he's listen he's just got his headphones on and I can a s I s I kinda skid past him and stop and I'm like, Hey, have I got the time wrong? Why aren't you inside? And he's got Narvana. 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? so offended that I've interrupted their banner and then I kinda 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 I get lost, I go into a a r the wrong class. 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. 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 corn and he had uh some other like metal bands mixed in with um Tribe Call 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 Biscuits. So uh so yeah, we just kinda cracked it off. We started to talk in quotes from uh kind of rap films.

From the early 90s, yeah, we were just it was just straight in with a flow. And by lunchtime, we were freestyling. Uh quietly at first, and then by the end of lunchtime, we had performed our first gig in a way. Everyone was kinda gathered around us and we were we were rappers. And uh on the way home, um, I turned to them and said, Hey Do you wanna be a rap group? And he was like, Abso fucking Lily. And that was it. We were a route group.

They practiced all the time, competing with each other to make up the smartest and funniest lyrics they could on the spot. So we created a game called Porcupine and uh 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. Why did you call it porcupine? Because Some people think that's a hard word to reign 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. They started performing gigs and 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. One night, Gavin, Billy, and Oscar stayed out very late and ended up going back to Gavin's room. Oscar got on the computer. I mean th the internet was kinda 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 uh as soon as we saw it, we thought, Yeah, of course we are. A record label is holding open auditions in London. Gavin, Billy, and Oscar took a thirteen 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.

it was quite apparent there's just no way we're gonna get in'cause there's far too many people here. And, um so what we decided to do was to go and uh um, ask if we could battle people for their spot. So we'd and no knowing like hi hip hop people once you get challenged to battle You can't say no.

Um, 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 you beat like ten, fifteen, twenty people. the the seas part, you know, and by the time we got to the front there was a there was so many people behind us kind of rooting for us like oh my god these guys actually are like Eminem. So the feeling outside is that these three Scotch kids are just gonna 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 were kind of shrinking as we got closer and closer and closer. When they got to the audition room, they handed the sound guide their C D. 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 ARs sitting behind it.

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

you know, their response. And the three of these these ARs were just like kind of looking at each other out the side of their eyes and kind of trying to stop themselves from laughing. And then about like 30 seconds in, 30, 40 seconds into my rap verse, they just kind of put their hand up to the sound guy and said, uh cool, cool, cool, cool, that's enough. 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 uh we said no, this this is serious. They they said this is this is a 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 it's drunk ginger people in skirts. Scotland is not rap. We can't sell that.

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. 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, Um it's kind of like this uh secure you got gotta get past a security gate, so we wait for ages, eventually a a guy c bringing records comes up the road, he goes in, we sneak in, um, we get to their office Billy's trying to flirt with the 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. We're like, look, it 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 um 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 C D.

And he plays the first beat and he's like, Oh God, yeah. And you can see he l 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 um the third one, he loves the beat again, as soon as we start rapping, pulls the CD out and uh he said, Don't make me say it. And I said, No, say it. And he's like, You fucking sound like the rapping proclaimer.

And the proclaimers are are are great. They're a m amazing Scottish group. Um they sing that classic song, I Will Walk Five Hundred Miles and uh they're Scottish heritage but he's meaning it in a like they're a bit of a joke, you know, like no rapper would ever listen to that, you know. Gavin says that he and Billy didn't say a word to each other for the whole thirteen hour bus ride back home. I kind of was really just trying not to cry. And a part of me was like, they are right though.

You know, I I saw that if your job is in marketing at the time and hip hop was all about uh 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.

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. 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, um he's trying to get this job but that he's a little small town boy and he's trying to make it in the in New York City and he he's just getting turned down everywhere. You know, it's'cause he doesn't fit.

they can't he doesn't fit in their world. And um he he goes into this one office to get changed'cause he's not wearing the right thing and he's trying to like go to this uh 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's and he starts to just pretend he is. And he gets so empowered that that he can be that person. And I think like, well, why don't we just become someone else?

If being Scottish was the problem, then they'd become Americans. I'm Phoebe Judge. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. I'm Maria Sharipova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trail-blazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

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Gavin Bain started recording himself, wrapping his lyrics with an American accent, just to see what it sounded like. 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 center 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. Uh my friend Brian was throwing this big party and he used to throw like really 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 uh I gave our DJ at the time, Skinny, I gave him the C D and I was like, Oh play this, it's a new American rapper I just heard play this uh you know, and he played it right after an M and M song.

And everyone was dancing and loving the M track and then he played that song and nobody like no one batted an eye. 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'cause he knows they're my lyrics and he's just like mind blown. He's like, oh my god, it sounds real. And then Gavin told Billy about his idea to pretend to be American.

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

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. 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 an American accent. We'd have sex, an American accent. Wait, what? Which our our girlfriends thought was really fucking annoying. Um I'm surprised they stayed with you.

I'm surprised as well. But but you only you like did you know anything about Americans besides The movies. I mean d wh what did you think American? Yeah, no we were like We'd just grown up watching American movies. Um we loved American stand up comedy. Um and we just took a whole bunch of different characters and we mashed them together.

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 Goodwill hunting and studied Matt Damon's character.

Billy studied Matthew Perry's character and 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. Gavin Bain became Brains MacLeod, 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 colourful clothes. And at the end of the two weeks they got back on the thirteen hour bus ride to London where The first place they went was Sony Records to meet with Dougie Bruce, the scout who had heard their song on the radio. And he's like, I like boys, you know, and he's got this broad Glaswegian accent. The first person, the first AR that interviews us is Scottish.

We're screwed at that point because when someone Scottish is speaking to someone Scottish you start to s to f kind of like you join, you know? And so we we were talking and I and we were both finding it very difficult not to say Scottish words and then eventually he said something, he said I and Bill went straight back with I can, which is I know in in Scotland. And

Two Americans would never know to say I can. It's in the way that Bill said it. 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 uh 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 this is you know, we're done here basically. And uh when we left that outside of the Sony building, I grabbed Bill and I said

W 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 the craziest version of who we wanna be. turn it all up to eleven and let's just go, you know. And so as soon as we went to the show that night, we kick in the door you know, we started stomping around, like we owned the place. We did this crazy stage show, chasing each other around. We're vomiting on the front road. Um and then when we came off stage this guy came up to us and he was like

Uh, where are you guys from? Now earlier in the morning when Douggy 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 uh Chris Rock uh Island Records. Billy says Huntington and I say Emmett 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. When you say you were like banging and stomping, is that something you thought like Americans did? Like they just kinda take the room? Yeah. Like

If you watch if you've grown up watching rap music videos, we just basically became like our our favourite rappers in those videos, you know. But then in person with people we would switch to characters from like friends, you know?

Um so we'd play uh Bill would play a version of Joey and I would play a version of uh Ross or Chandler. Because those are likable characters, you know. So we knew that when we're around people, don't be s b banging around and also that Those characters are actually closer to our personalities. I mean it's 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 melt. You know, every artist I've ever met.

um has been one person on stage and off stage a completely different person. I had seen loads of interviews uh with members of Slipknot and members of Corn and all these um kind of dangerous kind of rock bands. But actually they were like real sweethearts when the masks were off, you know?

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. Now that we're American, he was selling himself to us. So it's a big change, you know? And so he was like, tell me everything about you guys.

And that's a different question from where you from or what do you do or you know,'cause th that you kind of feel like you're being examined. So Bell and I just started telling the story like, Look, we're from this this uh kind of uh cookie cutter neighborhood and Hemet. And that you know, we we we met each other at the San Diego um vans tour because we had known a lot about the

specifically because the bands that played. We were really interested 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 the parking lot. in that so then we kind of incorporated that. We met at that at the San Diego work tour and then we moved to Huntington Beach, slept on the beach, under the You know, like this is just like versions of Chili Pepper songs now coming out, you know.

And then uh we got a um uh got this job and this uh skate store and we and then, you know, we became a rap grip, came over here, ran out of money and now you're gonna give us a record deal and let the fun continue. And the way it just flowed off the tongue, us cutting each other off. It was like we were rapping. Gavin says Chris seemed to believe the story completely. Gavin remembers that he even told them it was beautiful.

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 the main kind of open area and he was like, All right, do that thing now. Go and he's basically telling us to go around the room just repping 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. And eventually we get t to Chris. Everyone's like falling around laughing. We get to Chris and we start making fat jokes. And Chris's quite fat. And Chris was not laughing at this point. He started to look furious.

that the joke had now been turned on him, but as all of his staff were in tears laughing and then he they they realized he wasn't laughing and then they all stopped. And then he just burst out laughing and we knew that we've got it. Then we just felt like, God, we've this is easy. 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 Shallett.

Now this guy is the Simon Co., like the the the nicer version of Simon Co., you know, so he just gets straight to the point and he's like, what do you want? And uh 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 get out of bed in an American accent, we don't get out of bed for anything less than seventy K. And Billy looked at me like, What the holy crap, you know? But Jonathan Shalit said OK. Yeah. And all of a sudden we had seventy thousand.

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. And I think that changed something a little bit because my head started to be like What is this a crime? And and then Billy was like

What how d is this our money? You know? That didn't stop us from immediately going out and getting bluter drunk and The best week of our lives getting hammered every single day.

Jonathan Shallot'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 can. 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.

A big part of the story was that we became very close friends with D twelve and Eminem, which is quite a stretch. But uh 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 Um 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. What which one? I'm like, oh no. And I say slam city skates. And she's like, no, wait, I work at Slam C 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. Yeah, that's cool. But like I'm dying now because and I'm starting to sweat. I'm looking around for Bill, like I n I need help here.

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.

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 the 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 they were asking. So but but then on this day, people are pulling bill this way and we're not together. So we're we're not an earshot of each other. So I'm now done. I can feel the breathing my breathing starting to you kind of like you you're you're about to tell that I'm worried here, you know, uh 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 uh frame, like with a you know, a record in it, um, off the wall and it cracks. And then everyone turns and I sneak out of the room and go to the toilet. Went to the down at the toilet, vomited. kinda washed my face. But by the time I went back in Bell had kinda just got everyone going again and you know, she kinda forgot that line of questioning.

Gavin says they signed the contract, as Syllable and Brains, for 50,000 pounds up front, and 300,000 more when they released more material and their album. Did you have a plan? Did you say, Okay, we'll 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? I remember in Dundee in Scotland saying, Look, this is what we do. We go down, we get a record deal.

you know, we 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 uh 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? 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 Requests Live. Please put your hands together. Facillable and brains. Shut up! Great. Shut up. Boys, you are spanking new music. How would you describe your sound? Spanking. W spanking you. Spankingly new. Or comedy, humor. Excellent.

Well you did a performance for us to try and drag this back from the edge of despair. Yes and I'm not sure. Your mum's is what it was called. Well it wasn't called my mom's. Just your mum's. Moms and generals. Don't bring my mum into it, not on my own show. Let's take a look at it. It's very entertaining. And then, on live TV, the host asks them another question. So were you guys from Planet Zordon.

We're interrupted by aliens when we were kids and uh we travel around the solar system ever since then. Gavin says that when he got home that night, he googled syllable and brains to see what people were saying about them. And there was this website and these forums that were like, What's Gavin Bill doing? All these people who knew us in our life were online going, Wait, I know like what's Gavin?

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.

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 T V producers, Gavin says Sony decided to wait to release Syllable and Brains for a single until something happened with the TV show.

And in the meantime, Syllable and Brains was touring as much as they could. 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 uh Bill and I at this point were starting to do backflips off uh drum risers. We kept trying to up our stage show and it was kinda getting dangerous. By the end of the tour, they were exhausted. Gavin says he went to bed as soon as they got home at six AM.

And we've got like you know, I I think I sleep for one hour and then my phone goes at seven AM and it's one of the managers at um Jonathan Shout'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 who who's our best friends? And he's and I'm like, who? And he's like, M and M and D twelve. I'm just like, oh my god, no. Like how are we gonna pull this off?

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The episode's out now. Search for and follow the long game wherever you get your A couple of hours after Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd heard they'd be going on tour with Eminem and his group D twelve, 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.

You know, anyone sees us for five minutes around them, they're gonna 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 uh let's just see how it goes. Maybe we can hide. Maybe we can stay away from them. And so that we hold on to that. We think, All right, we'll just hide from them. We we will not be in the same place they're in. We come out of our tour bus, we walk right in

There's D twelve on stage sound checking. And we're like, shit. And then we turn to go, but all of the load-in's happening, so we can't get past the load in. The other side, all of our management team is there. Next to them is a camera crew who are there for MTV, filming D twelve and MM over on this promotional tour. So There's nowhere to go. So like the clock was just ticking in my head, like tick, ticking their um 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 we're 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 Bell and we kind of like, Yeah, fuck it, let's go And then we just stomp on the stage, like like we own the place. We're like, What up you know, like start high fiving them.

I high five um Bazaar and I'm like holding him, I'm like kinda wrapped my hands into his kind of 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 um 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?

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 five thousand people. Gavin says he'd never sweated so much as he did when they went on stage 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.

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. And he was like, you're Gavin and you're Billy and I know it all. 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. 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. You're like, what are you smoking? You know, we're like we're just making out that he's completely crazy. But then he says this thing to us where he's like th I think he 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 uh Bill walked into the the changing room and M and M 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. and he was he was gonna stop M and M and ask him. And I was trying to call his bluff. I was like, Yeah, yeah, ask him and then it s he got closer and closer and closer.

And I just like freaked out and I just like ran in the dressing room, which to Tim said, You're right and yeah. Um, 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.

Billy and Gavin kept touring and playing Pack Show. 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. 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 the record. We've got all this stuff going for us and we haven't released a record. Um the amount of money that's been spent on us at this point is over a million.

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.

So basically we have this big fight, um 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 it well there was a um a clause in the contract that if the band breaks up before the record comes out then they don't have to pay the money back. And so we essentially got away with not having to pay that money back. I mean how did you announce it to the fans?

Oh we we kinda just didn't. We just kind of went away. We went quiet. Billy went back to Scotland and eventually got a job on an oil rich. Gavin stayed in London and tried to make it work without Billy. But Sony stopped taking Gavin's call. 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.

And then, a couple of years after syllable and brain split up, Gavin heard that one of his closest friends from childhood had cancer. And he decided to put on a show. and then do it as a comeback show and make that money and then give I give Ivan the money for his treatment. But right before Gavin was about to go on stage, he heard that his friend had died.

And so when I walked out on stage, uh I kind of just looked out and the my band were playing the intro of the song and I was I was missing keys to go into the first lyric. And uh I tried to 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, Uh, I'm not Brains. I'm Gavin. Um and I've never been to America.

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 head in there until everyone was gone and then I snuck out the back. And when I snuck out the back, there was about two hundred kids. And I always thought they they wanted more answers. Like what what hap you know? And I just kind of started to apologize and then they started to rap my lyrics back to me.

They cared only about The lyrics. 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 Scoundrel. Gavin went on to have his own music career. He's working on an album right now. So yeah, I'm just having a lot of fun. And you're doing it all now in a Scottish accent. Yeah. Or whatever accent hits me. Yeah.

Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zujico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Canaine. 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 slash newsletter.

Gavin Bain has written a book about syllable and brains. It's called California Schemin. A movie about their story with the same title is coming out this year. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work.

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