#comedypop

The women in the photo are Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedy-pop singing group formed by CERN employees Angela Higney, Michele de Gennaro, Colette Marx-Neilsen, and Lynn Veronneau. The group was started by de Gennaro, a CERN graphic designer who was then dating (and is now married to) physicist Silvano de Gennaro. Frustrated by his long shifts in the lab, she took to songwriting; the single, "Collider," was then performed at the CERN Hardronic Festival on July 18, 1992.

It was there that Silvano de Gennaro took the photo, backstage, for the band to use as album art. After his stellar Photoshop job, fellow physicist and Cernettes superfan Tim Berners-Lee decided to place it on the World Wide Web, on the CERN's music page. Later, Mr, de Gennaro would be quoted as saying, "When history happens, you don't know that you're in it."

The group would go on to perform at CERN events for another 20 years, with the de Gennaros writing most of the group's music--other doo-wop songs such as "Liquid Nitrogen," "Mr. Higgs," and "My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize," all of which can be found in all their glory on YouTube.

The group's songs are meant to poke fun at the idea of a scientist's girlfriend waiting around for him, with the 60's-inspired costumes and melodies paired with lines like "You never spend your nights with me/You don't go out with other girls either/You only love your collider."

Harvard photo historian Robin Kelsey says, “There did seem to be something about that recycling of culture that seems so appropriate for the first image uploaded to [the Web], given the way that the Internet has spawned so much of that kind of recycling and mashing-up and pastiche and parody and so on.”

And so, as we come upon the 23rd anniversary of the Web's first picture, let's sing along to another Cernettes classic, "Suring on the Web"