Les Horribles Cernettes

Their songs, hilarious for high energy physicists and probably incomprehensible for others, are freely available on their Home Page [1].

Les Horribles Cernettes was founded by a secretary of the CERN, whose romantic relationship with a physicist was made difficult by numerous shifts. The girl attracted his attention by stepping on stage during the "CERN Hardronic Festival", singing "Collider", a melancholy song about the lonely nights endured by the girlfriend of a high energy physicist (excerpt):

I gave you a golden ring to show you my love

You went to stick it in a printed circuit

To fix a voltage leak in your collector

You plug my feelings into your detector

You never spend your nights with me

You don't go out with other girls either

You prefer your collider

You only love your collider

Your collider.

The group was subsequently formed around Silvano de Gennaro, who wrote numerous songs, while musicians and singers came in and out of the band. The fame of Les Horribles Cernettes grew and they were invited to international Physics conferences and The World'92 Expo in Seville, as well as celebrations such as Georges Charpak's Nobel Prize party. They received press coverage from numerous newspapers, including The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, La Tribune de Genève, and the CERN Courier [1].

The band's genesis at CERN ensured that it looms large in the history of the World Wide Web. Specifically, Les Cernettes were the first rock band to have a web site and the first image on the Web, as stated by Silvano de Gennaro [1]:

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!

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