TAKE THE RAP
Gavin Bain tells Claire Smith how he and his friend Billy Boyd landed a record deal when they pretended to be US hip hop act Silibil N’ Brains. Their misadventures in the music industry provide rich material for his Fringe show
We battle rapped our way through to the final and they just laughed at us. They called us ‘the rapping Proclaimers’
EVERYONE believed they were crazy Californian rappers who hung out with Eminem and spoke the authentic language of the streets. In fact, Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd were a couple of chancers from Dundee who decided that pretending to be American was the only way to get ahead in the record industry.
Silibil N’ Brains fooled the music industry for five years, their story became a book and a documentary and is now coming to Edinburgh in the form of a one-man Fringe show. “The idea is to tell the story but do it as a comedy show,” says Bain, aka Brains McLoud. “I always wanted to do that. That was part of the plan.”
Bain has only tried out five-minute comedy slots before and he’s hazy about the realities of the Fringe. But he has an astonishing story to tell. He says Irvine Welsh wanted to turn his autobiography – California Schemin – into a movie but the project was beaten to the screens by the documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax. “It is a strange thing to watch a film about your life,” says Bain, who wasn’t happy with the finished film. “I walked onto a set where everyone hated me.”
Now he says, it is time to tell the full story. And he believes he can make it make it funny.
“It’s going to include all the stuff I wasn’t allowed to put in the book. It will be me trying to make jokes out of some of the things that happened. There was a lot of very dark stuff that happened – a lot of death.”
We meet in a Soho pub round the corner from Denmark Street, home of UK music publishing. Bain is polite, friendly, enthusiastic. He lives in London now but was born in South Africa and his accent swoops around between vaguely colonial, Scottish, English and American.
Even as a child growing up in Scotland, he says he was living a fantasy life – getting beaten up by day and writing letters to his friends in South Africa about being a football star. Eventually he signed for Motherwell.
The seeds of the hip hop swindle were sown when he and his art school friend Billy Boyd came to London in 2001, when all the record companies were looking for “the new Eminem”. “We battle rapped our way through to the final and they just laughed at us. They called us ‘the rapping Proclaimers.’”
Humiliated, Bain and Boyd didn’t say a word to each other on the 13-hour trip back to Dundee – but at the funeral of a close friend they hatched a plan. “What if we become other people?”
The pair reinvented themselves as shock rappers from California, with a cocky attitude and sexually explicit lyrics. They decided they should stay in character 24 hours a day. And they were an overnight success. “Our first show was an industry showcase at Madame Jojo’s in Soho. We went on with fake knives wearing women’s clothing and pretended to stab each other No-one could look at us without saying, ‘Who are these guys?’ ”
Record industry executives were vying to sign the new discovery. At one point Sony UK and Sony US were fighting over them. Bain and Boyd had to make sure they weren’t signed by Sony US so no-one found out they had British passports.
With a UK record deal, Bain and Boyd were effectively trapped in character. “I remember having sex with my girlfriend in an American accent and for a while my mum thought I was gay because she thought she heard an American man in my room.”
Astonishingly Silibil N’ Brains supported D12 and Eminem on tour – without anyone realising they were fakes. Terrified, they walked on stage at the Brixton Academy, gave D12 big hugs and no-one said a word.
“We did end up hanging out with D12, but Eminem came on and off the tour. Whenever he turned up we’d have to get away. Even with guys who are the real thing, like D12, a lot of it is show. It’s amazing.”
Bain says the duo became experts at “freestyling the backstory”. If they came close to being found out, they would misbehave to create a diversion, But eventually, throwing themselves around on stage, too much stress and too much booze took its toll. When a close friend was dying, Bain found he couldn’t keep up the pretence any longer.
The game was up, the band were dropped by their record company and Bain found himself £50,000 in debt. He became a sort of con man, getting involved in the sex industry running an escort agency and blagging his way into a concession selling skater shoes.
California Schemin sold well and he now has a publishing deal to write another book. And since the release of The Great Hip Hop Hoax, Silibil N’ Brains have experienced a revival and are playing together again – as a sort of spoof version of themselves.
The idea of a Fringe show came after Bain was contacted by former jockey turned comedy promoter, performer and sometime rock group manager Bob Slayer. “He thought it was hilarious. He read the book and said I should do it as a comedy show.”
Bain is worryingly vague about his Fringe show. He can’t remember the name of the venue and is surprised when we look in the programme and find the show is called: Brains McLoud: 15 Reasons Why Justin Bieber is Gay.
“I can’t remember calling it that.” he says.
But he’s more than happy about the idea of winging it. “After all I’ve been through it’s a hard thing to make me nervous. If I thought doing this was going to make me scared, I’d be very happy.”
It’s an odd thing spending time with a self-confessed conman. After meeting Bain I found myself wondering if he really knows Irvine Welsh, is genuinely only 30 years old and actually did play for Motherwell. But truth sometimes is stranger than fiction.
l Brains McLoud: 15 Reasons Why Justin Bieber is Gay, Heroes @ Bob and Miss Behave’s Bookshop, 21-25 August, 11pm.