INXS Hire New Lead Singer

INXS' new signer, Ciaran Gribbin.

Marc Broussely/Redferns

INXS have announced that they have hired Irish singer Ciaran Gribbin as their latest frontman. Gribbin, who met keyboardist and primary songwriter Andrew Farriss at a party in Syndey two years ago, has already recorded demos with the band and will join them on the road for a brief tour in November.

Gribbin is the replacement for J.D. Fortune, an American singer who joined the band after winning the Rock Star: INXS competition but was fired for a second time last year. The band's original frontman, Michael Hutchence, committed suicide in 1997.

Photos: Random Notes
Farriss tells Billboard that he and the rest of INXS do not "have a master plan" regarding how they will move forward with Gribbin, but that they are "just really enjoying being creative" and "experimenting with a whole range of things" in the studio.

"A baptism of fire is the best way to describe the live shows, I think," Gribbin tells Billboard. "In a way I'm slightly nervous, and in another way I'm unbelievably excited. It's a wonderful, proud moment for me. It's a real feeling of achievement to have a band of INXS' stature believe in me as a performer and a singer. It's genuine dream-come-true, fairy-tale stuff for me. I'm still waking up in the morning here in Australia going, 'How did I get here?'"

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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