‘What the hell is this dude doing playing acid jazz?’: How the 1990s Cork music scene helped make Cillian Murphy a star
If you were young and carefree and lived in Cork in the early Nineties, at some point you’d have come across an up-and-coming new band led by a skinny frontman with an earnest gaze and a sensible haircut. The group was Sons of Mr Green Genes – freewheeling funk ragamuffins who took their name from a wacky Frank Zappa song. Their singer was a shy teenager named Cillian Murphy.
He was musically talented and not uncharismatic. But nobody who piled in to see Mr Green Genes in one of Cork city’s many pokey indie venues could have had an inkling they were watching a future Hollywood star. It would have blown their minds to know Murphy, 47, would arrive at the 2024 Oscars as hot favourite to win Best Actor for portraying the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, in a lavish biopic.
“I remember going to see his band in The Shelter. And I was like, ‘What the hell is
