Former INXS singer who once got Belfast paramilitaries dancing tells MGMA what great teams share

As a young musician in Belfast during the Troubles, Ciaran Gribbin took a gig at what he had been told was a football dinner dance. A few songs into the set, a man took the microphone and announced the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). About 15 masked, armed members of the loyalist paramilitary group then marched across the front of the stage.

Gribbin said he and his best friend were the only two Catholics in the room. The man handed back the microphone with orders to keep singing, and Gribbin launched into Tina Turner's "The Best." The UVF filled the dance floor.

"I looked around the room, and it's all about knowing your audience," Gribbin said.

Gribbin, a Grammy-nominated songwriter and former lead singer of INXS, told the story Sunday in San Antonio during the opening keynote of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) 2026 Annual Conference. "A band is no different from a corporate team," he told the ballroom of practice leaders. "Every member plays a role."

From Belfast clubs to INXS

Gribbin said he told his mother at 6 that he would be a rock star and picked potatoes at 11 to pay for his first guitar. By the early 1990s he was getting paid to play Belfast clubs as a teenager. Bombings and killings came weekly then, he said. He went by William at Protestant venues because Ciaran was "too Irish."

Music, he said, "softens the hardest hearts." He left the UVF gig believing that "if I could get the UVF out dancing, I could get anybody dancing."

He spent more than a decade after that playing pubs and clubs in Belfast, London and Dublin and sleeping in vans and on other people's couches, he said. Around 30, he gave up on stardom to focus on songwriting. His first co-writing session in London produced Madonna's "Celebration," which earned a Grammy nomination. He also wrote the song Al Pacino sings in the film "Danny Collins," which made the Oscar shortlist.

At 32, he told his wife a support-act tour of Australia would be one last roll of the dice. On that trip he spent four nights next door to INXS keyboardist Andrew Farriss, and late on the last night he sang the band's "Mystify" at a party. Four or five months later, a cryptic email led to a call inviting him to Australia to write songs and try out.

On his fourth day there, in a studio with the band, Tim Farriss, Andrew's brother, offered him the job. Within months, Gribbin said, he was on stage in Buenos Aires in front of 30,000 people. He joined INXS as its singer in 2011.

What do great bands share?

Gribbin described six traits, each paired with a band and a live song from his Rock and Roll Team Building band. Trust went with INXS, connection with Oasis, adaptability with U2, focus with AC/DC, authenticity with Radiohead and collaboration with the Beatles.

INXS had three brothers in the lineup, but all the members called one another brothers, he said. The band lived by a "whatever it takes" motto on the way from the pubs of Sydney to Wembley Stadium.

U2 had just marked 50 years as a band, Gribbin noted. He said it kept reinventing its sound and became the first band to play the Sphere in Las Vegas without changing its people: "the same team, the same crew, the same manager, the same guy that drives the bus, the same guy that sets up the gear."

He called collaboration probably the most important of the six. John Lennon and Paul McCartney could each write a hit alone, Gribbin said, but most of the Beatles' hits came from the two of them together. They were sure enough of themselves to joke that one day's song would buy a Rolls-Royce and the next day's would put a swimming pool in the house.

"That's how confident and sure they were in themselves," Gribbin said. "But they trusted each other."

The keynote ended with the audience singing a three-part "Free Fallin'." The room then sang an original song Gribbin's band wrote for MGMA's 100th anniversary, built around the conference theme, "From Here Forward."

The last verse came from volunteers' answers about where they were from and what they did. One was the director of an independent physician association in Oregon.

"When we are all in harmony," Gribbin had told the room early on, "that's when the magic happens."

Medical Economics is in San Antonio at the MGMA Annual Conference, Sept 27-30, celebrating 100 years of MGMA, attending sessions and speaking with industry leaders. Follow our coverage on our MGMA conference page.