Les Horribles Cernettes

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Les Horribles Cernettes

Thought to be the First photograph on the Web.

Les Horribles Cernettes (IPA: [lez ɔʁiblə sɛ:ʁnɛt], French "The Horrible CERN Girls") is a parody pop group, self-labelled "the one and only High Energy Rock Band". Their musical style is often described as doo-wop. It is worth noting that the initials of the name, LHC, are the same as the Large Hadron Collider being constructed at CERN.

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, an analyst in the Computer Science department at CERN, who wrote additional songs. 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 [2]. The band's lineup has changed over time, but they are still performing as of 2006.

Silvano de Gennaro has said that Les Cernettes were the subject of the first photographic image on the Web (and the first rock band to have a website) [3]:

"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!"