A real smash hit

A s pop bands go, they never reached the dizzy heights of global fame. Nevertheless, last night's farewell concert by Les Horribles Cernettes is destined to go down in history.

The girl group, whose repertoire includes 1960s classics and originals such as Microwave Love, Every Proton of You and My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize, was founded in 1990 by Michele de Gennaro, a secretary at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland who sang about being lonely while her boyfriend worked all hours on high-energy physics. The initials of the band's name are shared with Cern's Large Hadron Collider, and that first bittersweet doo-wop love ballad was titled (You Only Love Your) Collider.

Ramping the nerd factor up to warp speed 10 is the fact that a picture of the Cernettes was the first image posted on the World Wide Web, also invented at Cern in 1990, by Tim Berners-Lee.

Last night's gig took the band back to Switzerland for Cern's Hardronic Festival, and while it was billed as a farewell, invitations for television and other performances suggest a reunion concert may not be far away.

Then again, they may not be taking themselves too seriously. The billing for the Hardronic Festival? "Cern's worst band, well all of them really."