We rapped our way to a deal with Sony, our story was fake and accents phoney

Ignored by the music industry, the intrepid duo decided to reinvent themselves as American hip-hop artists, claiming to hail from California.

Their cover was so convincing that they fooled US record labels and embarked on a remarkable journey which saw them rap alongside Eminem, party back stage with Madonna and be tipped as among the next generation of rising stars.

Now the story of their amazing double-life is to be told in a new book and the pair have signed a deal to turn their story into a film, with Irvine Welsh set to write the screenplay.

In 2003, Boyd and Bain, aka Silibil n' Brains, were students struggling to be taken seriously as rap artists. So as a last resort they told record producers they were from California and suddenly people were interested.

What started out as a joke soon turned in to a reality for the pair as they conned their way to a record contract worth 150,000.

Boyd said: "We started out performing in Scottish accents, but every time we contacted a label and said we were rappers from Dundee, we just got laughed at down the phone.

"Most people would just hang up, so once for a joke I pretended that we were from California and were in the UK for a few weeks, and all of a sudden people were interested in us.

"We found it bizarre. Our songs were exactly the same, the only difference was that we sang them in American accents and suddenly we were successful."

Boyd, 28, who now runs Concrete Jungle, a fashion boutique and art gallery in Dundee, said: "At an audition we rapped with Californian accents. Then an Island Records producer came up to us and asked us where were from.

"We couldn't say we were actually from Dundee so we just pretended to be from California. After that we couldn't go back or we knew that we would never get a record deal."

Things moved fast and within months they had been signed by Sony and started performing in London.

Soon they were attending parties with the likes of Kelly Osbourne, Green Day and Jamelia. They also spent time with Little Britain stars David Walliams and Matt Lucas, and MTV tipped them alongside Bloc Party and Natasha Bedingfield to be the stars of 2004.

Boyd adds: "The hardest part was the constant act. The problem was as our friendship group grew, it became harder to keep up the pretence."

When work began to stall and the pretence became too much, they decided to come clean.

Boyd said: "We always planned on announcing that we were Scottish but we wanted to wait until we were at the peak of our success."

Now the full story will be told after the publisher Simon & Schuster won a bidding war for the book, California Schemin' written by Bain, 27.

Patrick Walsh, their agent, said: "The book is a fantastic story about two guys who led this remarkable life. We have now signed a deal for a film and Irvine Welsh is going to be working on a screenplay."

BACKGROUND

OTHER acts have made equally audacious entries into the music industry.

In May 1993 Oasis arrived at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow. They were refused entry but bullied their way in and forced their way on to the stage. Alan McGee was there and immediately signed the band to Creation.

In July 2008 the Cambridge indie band Hamfatter appeared on the television show Dragon's Den, and came away with an investment of 75,000 from Peter Jones.

In February 2006 the singer Sandi Thom claimed to have launched her career online from the basement of her Tooting flat, although it later emerged she had a record company.