Wes Brislen: Vocals and guitar, born on the 29th August 1977 in Liverpool.
John Parkes: Guitar, bass guitar, and backing vocals,
born on the 5th June 1980 in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
Jon: "The Warbler" Gibson: Drums and backing vocals, born...Yes, in Glasgow-Still alive? Barely!!!
Influences
Oasis, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, Guns N Roses, The Who, Black Crowes, Ryan Adams.
The Riffs are a four piece guitar band in Tenerife playing rock covers, we consist of myself (John) on bass guitar, Gary Boyd on guitar and vocals, Wes Brislen on guitar and vocals and Jon G on drums.
How we got together is kind of a strange story... I met Wes in October 2004 at the end of a daytime drinking session with a couple of mates, we got chatting and it turned out he played guitar and liked all the same music as me. We went to the office where I practiced with my then band, Loaded. We jammed for a bit and to be honest, although he was rusty I knew he was an excellent guitarist. I gifted him a practice amp there and then as he didnt' have anything to play through at home, I don't know why I did that. We then went back to the pub and I met his girlfriend Emma, who it turns out I already knew, and had known for 10 years!
So, Wes and I started to jam together on acoustic guitars, we did some acoustic gigs in some local bars and private parties then in the new year of 2005 the wheels of Loaded started to fall off. Miguel the drummer left because of work committments which opened up a place for a drummer - Wes came in on drums and was pretty damn good - I can't remember why we got another guy in but we did and that meant Wes could go on guitar, we played as a 5 piece for a while but:
Wes and I had met a long haired hippie called Jon G who was doing some compering and he did a Marti Pellow show one night in the Polygon, Wes had been nagging me to give him a go on my drums for ages and we decided to have a jam one night which we invited Gary along to.
We played a load of Beatles songs as we were all big Beatles fans and decided to start a Beatles cover band and run it alongside Loaded. Gary wasn't that bothered about it at first and he wasn't that dedicated to this new venture until it became apparant that Loaded was falling apart from the inside out and the music sounded much better in the Beatles band and it was getting ridiculously hard to practice with both bands. At this point we decided to put Loaded to bed.
We practiced our Beatles set and by the end of June we were offered our first gig, it went very well and from that we were offered a gig at Chicago's in Los Cristianos. We played 2 gigs in Chicago's, the first was very successful the second not so much, mainly due to the compere not explaining how his weird sound system worked, I think we pissed him off by nagging him to come down and sort it out- either way they didn't ask us back.
Over the summer we did 12 gigs in Los Cristianos and Las Americas, mid way through that run we were asked by the bar we were playing in- Flanaghans - to do non Beatles stuff, which meant we had to cobble together a set pretty quickly, which we managed to do but ultimately the bar was so quiet and we were given the elbow.
The last gig at Flanaghans was a disaster, Jon G was acting the goat and there was no one in the bar....basically it was shit and we all had a go at each other about it and then we hardly played for the next 2 or 3 months.
Then, in April 2006 we decided it was high time to do another gig, we thought we'd better test the water after last time, so we organised a gig in our local bar, The Polygon. This was probably the best gig we have ever played - we played a mixture of old and new songs including You Really Got Me, Brown Sugar, Sweet Home Alamaba, Freebird, The Importance Of Being Idle and the obligatory selection of Beatles classics.
So far over the summer we've played numerous gigs over Las Americas and Los Cristianos and received very positive feedback - we have just celebrated our first year together and are almost at the 20th gig mark - we're enjoying ourselves!
