The Frank Zappa-Inspired Band Cillian Murphy Was In Before Hollywood Stardom

Actor Cillian Murphy played the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the Oscar-nominated feature film, Oppenheimer. The film earned a leading 13 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture for the Christopher Nolan-directed biopic and Best Actor for Murphy’s portrayal of the scientist known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”

Murphy, nominated for Best Actor alongside Paul Giamatti, Colman Domingo, Jeffrey Wright and Bradley Cooper, will learn if he is this year’s Oscar winner on Sunday at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. Murphy’s road to Hollywood stardom might not have materialized had the talented actor pursued his passion for playing music.

After a year of washing dishes at a restaurant in County Cork, Murphy had saved up enough money to purchase his first guitar, a Fender Telecaster he procured around age 18 or 19. Though not from a family of artists, Murphy’s brother Páidi Murphy learned to play piano. The pair of siblings went on to form a band together taking their name from a song by Frank Zappa.

The Sons Of Mr. Green Genes, named after Zappa’s “Son Of Mr. Green Genes” that appeared on the 1970 album Hot Rats, was a short-lived band featuring Cillian on guitar and Páidi (who abandoned music for product design) on keyboards. Other members of The Sons Of Mr. Green Genes included drummer Bobby Jackson, guitarist Eoin O’Sullivan and bassist John Powell and later bassist Chris McCarthy and lead guitarist John Ahern.

“My brother is an excellent pianist, jazz,” Cillian told Marc Maron on the WTF podcast. “He’s really, really good. We used to play in the band with me hen when we were kids. It’s hard to play Zappa [but] we were fans. Not of the totally avant-garde stuff, ore of the kind of Hot Rats [stuff].”

Cillian told Maron The Sons Of Mr. Green Genes were offered a record deal, which he previously said was “a five-album deal by the Acid Jazz label in London,” but ultimately decided against signing, in part because his brother was only 16 years old. Calling it a “shitty deal,” Murphy expressed relief in having avoided a potentially problematic situation.

“We were influenced by Zappa and acid jazz,” Murphy told Maron. “But we were a bit late to the scene. It was like long guitar solos … I played rhythm guitar. We had an amazing guitar player. It wasn’t commercial. It didn’t record very well. It was good live, but it didn’t work in a studio very well.”

The Sons Of Mr. Green Genes drummer Bobby Jackson recently spoke to the Irish Examiner about he time in the band that formed in early 1990. Still teens when the group came together, the members cycled through other names like The Townhouses and Sarahdaze, before landing on the Zappa-inspired one they went with. Jackson remembered the first song the band rehearsed was “All I Want Is You” by fellow Irish musicians U2.

Recalling the salad days of The Sons Of Mr. Green Genes, Jackson – who maintains a close relationship with Cillian Murphy, each is godparent to the other’s child – further described what the band was like:

“Sometimes, we started getting ahead of ourselves with unusual arrangements. We’d have a good arrangement with a good beat to it, and then we would throw in these stupidly complex time signatures for no other reason than showing off. We’d have something with a great groove to it, and then we’d overcomplicate it.

“I remember at one early stage, we were doing a gig in a hotel in Mitchelstown. Remarkably, it was our parents who were driving us to these gigs. We might have been 15 years old. So, here we were in this hotel on a Sunday afternoon, playing original music, all dressed up in our hippie clothes. I remember Cillian wriggling and rolling around the carpet. He didn’t seem to be in any way bothered or self-conscious, while these people were trying to eat their carvery lunches.

“I’ll never forget the energy at those gigs, when it kicked off. The atmosphere was incredible, the place was jammed with people. They were our best gigs. There was a power cut at one gig just before Christmas Eve. We were maybe two or three songs from the end of the set. The people running the venue came around with candles so we could finish the gig with an acoustic set. It was snowing outside. It was just magical.”

See a pre-Hollywood fame Cillian Murphy in a news clip briefly performing with, and speaking about, his Frank Zappa-inspired band The Sons Of Mr. Green Genes and listen to the track “Time Travel” from an obscure recording session purportedly from 1996 below: