First web image band to play one last time

London: An all-female doo-wop band Les Horribles Cernettes, whose image is believed to be the first photo uploaded on the World Wide Web, are set to play their final gig on July 21. The band will be performing for the last time at the Hardronic Festival at the Cern laboratory in Geneva - the birthplace of the web. A picture of the women was uploaded to the web on 18 July, 1992, by the web creator and fan Tim Berners-Lee. He wanted it to test out the version of the web that he was working on at Cern. The band had been founded in 1990 by Michele de Gennaro who worked as a graphic designer. The band gets their name from the initials of the giant particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, used at Cern to investigate fundamental physics. The group won fame in the scientific circles by performing at social gatherings and physics conferences. The women sing classic 60s pop songs, as well as their own compositions such as ‘Microwave Love,’ ‘Collider’ and ‘My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize.’ The gig at the annual Cern music festival will be their first performance in the last five years and is billed as their last. Jim Halley, manager of the band, said that there had been a huge upsurge of interest in the band because of the anniversary of the image being uploaded on the web. Halley said that the band had been even featured on the US talkshow hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. The growing interest has led the Cernettes to post a message on their website explaining their distress at the “press tornado” that is surrounding them. In particular, they took the issue with a report on ‘Motherboard’ about the circumstances surrounding the use of the image. In the message, the Cernettes pointed out that no one knows which photograph was the first that was uploaded to the web. However, they said, that the image did have some importance for the history of the internet. “This photo was one of those that changed the web, from a platform for physics documentation, to a media for our lives,” the BBC quoted them as saying. Halley on the contrary said that it was really one of the first photos as nobody has found anything else loaded before it put it that way. The picture had been taken by Silvano, the husband of founder Gennaro, during the band’s early days when he was trying to spread the word about them. Halley said that he has been advising the Cernettes to keep on gigging rather than give up on their musical careers. “The whole world has gone nuts for them,” he added. ANI