The Big Lie
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Who are Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, and what is their story?
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I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen, and the water was pitch black. I started swimming, and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below.
I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes, available now on This Is Love. This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Well, let's just jump right in and let's just start with you introducing yourself.
Oh, God.
And it's not a trick question. It's like a very simple, just what's your name?
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 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 Russian. 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 cornrolled. A Hanson t-shirt. I don't know why he's wearing that. But he's just got his headphones on and I kind of skid past him and stop.
What inspired Gavin and Billy to create their rap group?
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? 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 of the first person. But then I get lost. I go into 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 Korn and he had some other 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 from the early 90s. Yeah, it was just straight in with the 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, abso-fucking-lutely. And that was it. We were a rap group.
They practiced all the time, competing with each other to make up the smartest and funniest lyrics they could on the spot.
How did they prepare for the audition in London?
So we created a game called Porcupine, and that was a way for us to battle rap each other, but then also throw each other words, and then we'd just start freestyling off the word.
And why did you call it Porcupine?
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 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 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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who are Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, and what is their story?
0:00–2:09
2
What inspired Gavin and Billy to create their rap group?
2:09–3:59
3
How did they prepare for the audition in London?
3:59–6:35
4
What challenges did they face during their first performance?
6:35–8:47
5
How did their American personas affect their careers?
8:47–10:51
6
What led to the downfall of Syllable and Brains?
10:51–13:12
7
How did Gavin cope with the aftermath of the group's breakup?
13:12–15:39
8
What lessons did Gavin learn from his experiences in the music industry?
15:39–47:52