Two Scottish rappers who pretended to be American in order to be taken seriously are to have their story made the subject of a film. The screenplay, penned by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, is based on the experiences of Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd (presumably not the one who was a hobbit...), aka Silbil n Brains. The pair apparently feigned US accents after being scorned by record executives, and subsequently secured a œ150k recording contract.
The film will be based on Gavin Bain's book about the series of events, California Schemin. Billy Boyd told the BBC how it all came about, explaining that the duo had tried to arrange meetings with labels, but had the phone hung up on them: "Once, just for a laugh I thought, what I'll do is I'll put on an American accent" he said. "It automatically changed, the attitudes changed. It evolved from that moment, we thought that what we'd do is we would re-record all our music in American and we'd say we're on tour from America".
Signed to Sony, the duo attended the Brit Awards, went to parties and generally lived the high life until about 2005, when they split, frustrated by delays in releasing their music. Boyd, who now runs a clothes and art shop, continued: "The idea wasn't we'll pretend and we'll try to get really rich and famous from it and we'll just rip everyone off. What we planned on doing is becoming this superstar act and then maybe at the height of our career we'd turn round and release it - that by the way, we're actually Scottish. Almost getting one over on the industry, getting our own back, because we felt it was unfair that we weren't treated with the same respect for being Scottish artists as we would've being American artists".
He added: "I love the story, what we've got away with is just crazy, it's really cheeky. It's something you can always look back on and go 'when I was that age I did this' and no-one else is going to have that story - that I signed a major record deal pretending to be someone else and got all this star stuff from it. What makes it quite funny is the fact that we didn't actually release anything, so it's not like we've become these superstars, we didn't even get to that level. We were living the life of these successful artists, but we hadn't actually had any success, which is part of the blag I guess".