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When Kate McAlpine posted her Large Hadron Rap on YouTube, she could hardly have predicted what a Big Bang it would make.

An excruciating pun, agreed, but the proud history of music at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, is awash with creaking wordplays.

McAlpine, a graduate student from Michigan State University on assignment at Cern, has notched up some 2 million views with her rap marking the arrival of the world’s biggest particle collider and explaining the basics for those who still get confused between a proton and a crouton.

But she is not the first Cernite to harness the incredible power of music, nor indeed of the web.

Back in 1990, a Cern secretary frustrated at a lack of attention from her particle physicist boyfriend turned to Silvano de Gennaro, Cern’s resident songwriter, and asked him to put her story to music.

The result was aired for the first time at that year’s Cern summer party, the Hardronic festival, by a doo-wapping girl band who called themselves Les Horribles Cernettes – a nod to the Large Hadron Collider, the ‘God machine’ that had barely even made it to the drawing board by then.

They were an instant hit, rousing the sub-atomic geeks into a frenzy. They quickly became a regular fixture on the Cern social circuit with songs like Daddy’s Lab, My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize and, their very first song, Collider (video below). Its refrain? ‘You never spend your nights with me/You don’t go out with other girls either/You only love your collider’.

The Cernettes were not the only thing happening at Cern around that time, of course. There was a British research fellow called Tim Berners-Lee trying to marry hypertext, domain names and the internet to create what he called the World Wide Web. He put his first “Web site’ online in August 1991.

The following year he saw De Gennaro editing a photo of “those Cern girls” and asked for a copy. The picture at the top of this post, according to the band’s official history, was the first ever posted on the web. The Cernettes (who still make occasional appearances although only one founding member still in the line-up) were the first band anywhere in the world to have their own webpage.