Brioles: Forty Years of Rock'n'Roll Between Genre Labels
Brioles have been called rockabilly, psychobilly, punkabilly and neo-rockabilly. In 1991, when the band had only been going a few years, they preferred a much simpler definition: a rock'n'roll band.
That resistance to fitting neatly into one label is a better way to follow their forty years of history than any retrospective classification.
Brioles began in Barcelona around the brothers Jorge and Daniel Nunes. The band's own account today places the first rehearsals in the summer of 1986, while a profile published by Ruta 66 in April 1991 said that Brioles, "as such", had been born at the start of 1987. The two dates may describe different moments of the same process: the gestation through 1986 and the line-up settling the following year.
From there the story connects the late-eighties Barcelona underground with France, Berlin, small independent European labels, a long discography and a network of musicians and projects that has stayed active for four decades.
Before Brioles
Jorge and Daniel Nunes did not arrive at Brioles from a strictly revivalist reconstruction of fifties rockabilly.
They had been through other groups first, and through a scene where punk, rock'n'roll and the new sounds coming from Europe coexisted with genre boundaries that were never very firm.
Daniel has recalled his time in a group called ¿No hueles a perro? and later in The Boppins. Jorge would end up in that orbit too. Those years also saw records by bands like Batmobile, Guana Batz or Restless starting to circulate, part of a new European generation that was taking rockabilly somewhere different.
When Brioles appeared, Jorge was on guitar and vocals, Daniel on upright bass and Javier "Bugs" on drums.
The date 8 August 1987 appears repeatedly in later accounts as Brioles' first concert, at Communiqué, Barcelona. The reference is consistent across the later bibliography, although the available contemporary chronology places the beginning of Brioles more securely at the start of that year.
What is documented precisely is that only a few years later Brioles had already travelled well beyond Barcelona.
Two Berlin shows that opened a door
In April 1991, Ruta 66 reported that Brioles had already played Barcelona, Andalusia, the Basque Country and Valencia, had travelled repeatedly to France and had played two concerts in Berlin.
The German shows do not appear to have been well attended. But they had a more lasting consequence.
Through that visit, Brioles came into contact with Jungle Noise, a small German label connected to the European psychobilly scene.
Two songs from those first recordings, "Esta Noche" and "Un Monstruo Entre los Dos", ended up on the international compilation Welcome To Your Nightmare, released in 1990.
The episode shows how part of that scene worked before the internet. A band from Barcelona could travel to Berlin, play to few people and still make a contact capable of putting their songs on a German record alongside groups from other countries.
Brioles' international reach did not necessarily begin with big festivals or an organised tour. It also went through small shows, personal contacts, tapes and independent labels.
A rock'n'roll band
By then it was still not very clear what Brioles should be called.
The 1991 Ruta 66 article collected several of the labels already circulating around the group: punkabilly, rockabilly and psychobilly.
Brioles preferred something broader.
Rock'n'roll.
The band would end up closely tied to rockabilly and psychobilly circuits, but its music was never wholly subordinate to just one of them.
Their recordings carry elements of rockabilly, garage, punk, blues and rock'n'roll, combined in a way that over the years would even produce another word around the group: "Briobilly".
Rather than treating that term as an independent historical genre, it is more useful to read it as a later way of naming a mixture the band itself had spent decades defending from a broader idea of rock'n'roll.
The first demos
The documentation of the first recordings still holds some contradictions.
Different later accounts speak of a session in 1988 that produced six songs, four of them distributed on a demo.
But when Carajillo Records released 1988 Demo Tapes in 2014, the selection included five tracks that do not fully match that earlier list: "Los Dos", "Un Monstruo Entre Nosotros", "El Cerdo Humano", "Cien Kilos" and "Esta Noche".
The 1991 press also confirms that some of those first recordings were the ones that ended up on Welcome To Your Nightmare.
The exact relationship between the 1988 sessions, the tapes that circulated and the selection released decades later remains uncertain. There may have been more than one cassette configuration, or a session wider than the selection distributed, but the available sources do not yet close that gap.
From cassette to vinyl
Brioles' first LP came in 1991, released by Macaco Records with catalogue number MA-002.
That year is supported both by discographic sources and by Jorge Nunes himself, and it fits the contemporary chronology: as late as April 1991 the band was talking in Ruta 66 about the difficulty of finding a way to release their material.
From there a discography begins that runs for more than three decades.
Enmedio de la Jungla appeared in 1993. Then came Train of Fools in 1998, Rocket Men in 2000, Jungle Jamboree in 2006, Love, Rhythm and Hate in 2009 and Down, Down, Down in 2012.
Later still would come new recordings and recoveries of earlier material.
The sequence matters less as an inventory than as evidence of continuity: Brioles went on recording well past the first stretch of the late eighties and early nineties.
Two brothers and a network of bands around them
Brioles' stability does not mean their history happened inside a closed line-up.
Jorge and Daniel Nunes are the constant through it all, but around them, over decades, other musicians, bands and shared projects appear.
Bop Pills is one of the clearest overlaps. Jorge and Daniel appear linked to both Brioles and Bop Pills, and the two also shared Jorge Nunes & His Fulltime Fools. Daniel appears as well in projects such as Legacaster and Matt & the Peabody Ducks.
They are not necessarily bands derived from one another. What those connections show is a scene where musicians move between line-ups, pick up former bandmates again and meet once more under different names.
That network extends one step further to Fuego Salvaje, the name Wildfire Willie used when performing in Spain backed by The Bop Pills and other bands. It is a tangential connection as far as Brioles is concerned, but it helps make sense of the musicians around the band.
Brioles stays at the centre of that story not because it absorbed all those projects, but because Jorge and Daniel kept coming back to it while developing other musical combinations in parallel.
The drummer changes, the core stays
That combination of continuity and movement also shows inside the line-up itself.
Javier "Bugs" was the first drummer. Then came a brief replacement and, at the end of 1988, Salvador "El Joker", who stayed for several years.
Later Blas Picón took the drum stool, another musician connected to different rock'n'roll and rhythm & blues projects. Pedro A. Ortega followed him and, after a brief return by Picón, Josep Maria Ruera came in.
The names and the phases change.
Jorge and Daniel stay.
That structure has let Brioles change the line-up without every change forcing them to rebuild the band from scratch.
Jungle Noise a second time
The relationship with Jungle Noise also left one small documented episode that is particularly revealing.
When Ruta 66 interviewed Brioles in April 1991, the group had recorded a Catalan Christmas carol for the German label's Christmas compilation.
The project was, at that moment, stalled.
Months later Wreckin' Around the Christmas Tree appeared.
Among its songs was "Fum, Fum, Fum", performed by Brioles.
The story can be followed almost in real time: first the project pending; then the finished record.
It is a small piece within four decades of the band's history, but it captures the scale at which part of that European scene worked: recordings sent between countries, compilations with small pressings, contacts that came from gigs and an international network built long before digital distribution.
Forty years later
In 2026 Brioles reaches forty years since those first rehearsals.
The anniversary arrives with a line-up of Jorge Nunes, Daniel Nunes and Josep Maria Ruera, and with a new record, XL.
The project also has an explicit retrospective component. Brioles have chosen songs that accompanied or influenced the band across these four decades and taken them back into the studio with the current line-up.
The journey ends, for now, close to the definition they were already defending in 1991.
A guitar, an upright bass, a drum kit and rock'n'roll.
All that time others have gone on adding words around it.
Rockabilly. Psychobilly. Punkabilly. Neo-rockabilly. Briobilly.
Brioles' history is more accurate when those labels are understood as layers of context rather than as a single answer.
A note on sources
- Ruta 66, no. 61, April 1991, "Los Brioles — El discreto encanto del r'n'r" — for the early line-up, Bugs, the first drummer changes, the shows in France and Berlin, Jungle Noise and Brioles' self-definition as a rock'n'roll band: Internet Archive
- Daniel Nunes interview, Sesión de Plasma, 21 June 2018 — for the groups before Brioles and his memories of the first line-up: Sesión de Plasma
- Brioles interview, Ruta 66, 18 July 2012 — for the discographic chronology given by Jorge Nunes: Ruta 66, 2012
- Jorge Nunes, Ruta 66, 2016 — for the 1991 first LP and the retrospective view of thirty years of the band: Ruta 66, 2016
- Efe Eme, 28 March 2015 — for the story of the first demos and the Macaco Records release: Efe Eme
- El Toro Records, XL — for the 2026 line-up, the first rehearsals dated to the summer of 1986 and the approach of the fortieth-anniversary record: El Toro Records
- Axel Gieseking / Jungle Noise, retrospective on Welcome To Your Nightmare — for the 1990 compilation and Brioles' presence on it: Jungle Noise retrospective
