Luv – You’re the Greatest Lover
A Dutch producer watched a German girl group on television in the mid-1970s, decided he could do it better, and went looking for three women to prove it. The group he assembled spent months auditioning before they ever sang a note in public.
Luv’ did not begin with three singers. It began with a producer watching television. In the mid-1970s, the Dutch producer Hans van Hemert was watching the popular German music program Musikladen when the German group Silver Convention came on — a studio-built female vocal act that had scored international disco hits. Van Hemert’s reaction was not admiration but competitive certainty: he believed he could do the same thing, and do it better. He brought the idea to the songwriter Piet Souer and the manager Han Meijer, and the three of them set out in 1976 to manufacture a Dutch girl group from scratch. Van Hemert and Souer would write the songs. What they did not yet have was anyone to sing them. The group came last. There followed a selection process that ran for months — auditions, screen tests, the assembling of a trio that did not exist until its makers decided who would be in it. The three women they chose were Patty Brard, José Hoebee, and Marga Scheide. The group was named Luv’.
By the time Luv’ released “You’re the Greatest Lover” in July 1978, the manufactured trio had become a genuine act with real hits behind them — the 1977 single “U.O.Me,” written as the theme to a Dutch television series, had given them their first Top 5 success in the Netherlands and Belgium. But the group was also, at that exact moment, fighting for the right to its own name. Manager Han Meijer considered the name “Luv'” his personal property and took the three singers to court over its use. The legal action was resolved only in early June 1978 — weeks before “You’re the Greatest Lover” was released — when the women won and were officially confirmed as the rightful owners of the name they performed under. Pim ter Linde became their new manager. With the name secured, Luv’ could finally turn its full attention to the goal van Hemert had set from the start: an international career. “You’re the Greatest Lover” was the record that delivered it.
Janschen & Janschens, a Metropole Orkest string section, and a No. 1
“You’re the Greatest Lover” was written by Hans van Hemert and Piet Souer under their shared pseudonym, Janschen & Janschens — the name they used on the labels of nearly every Luv’ record. Van Hemert produced the track; Souer arranged and conducted it. The recording had a quality that set it apart from a cheap manufactured-pop single: a real string section, played by Ernő Olah and the Metropole Orkest, the renowned Dutch orchestra, giving the song a lush, full-bodied sound underneath its disco pulse. At two minutes and fifty seconds, it was compact and built entirely for impact — a bright, immediate Europop record with a chorus designed to lodge in the ear on first hearing. It appeared on the group’s debut album, With Luv’, released in August 1978.
The single did exactly what van Hemert had set out to do when he first watched Silver Convention. “You’re the Greatest Lover” reached No. 1 on the Dutch Top 40, where it held the top position for three weeks and spent fifteen weeks on the chart in total. More importantly, it broke Luv’ out of the Benelux region and across the continent. The single sold more than a million copies across Continental Europe, earned a gold certification in Germany for 500,000 copies sold, and became a hit in Scandinavia, Israel, and South Africa. It was the record that turned a Dutch studio project into Holland’s most successful musical export — and it remains, by wide agreement, the signature song of the group, the peak of everything Luv’ achieved.
From a manufactured trio to Holland’s biggest export
The performance featured on this page comes from TopPop, the flagship pop music program of the Dutch national broadcaster AVRO. TopPop ran from 1970 to 1988 and functioned as the Netherlands’ equivalent of the United Kingdom’s Top of the Pops — the program where a Dutch act’s hit single met its national television audience. This performance dates from October 21, 1978, placing it squarely within the song’s three-week run at No. 1 on the Dutch Top 40: Luv’ performing their breakthrough single on national television at the precise moment it sat atop the chart. For a group that had been assembled by committee, performing a song written under a pseudonym, the TopPop appearance was the image that sold it — three performers who, whatever the circumstances of the group’s creation, were now genuinely the biggest pop act in the country.
Luv’ followed “You’re the Greatest Lover” with a remarkable run — “Trojan Horse,” “Casanova,” and a string of further European hits — and in 1978 and 1979 the group was officially recognized as Holland’s best music export act, receiving the Conamus Export Award for sales of some 2.5 million records in two years. The original trio’s first run ended in 1981, though the group’s name continued through later lineups and periodic reunions across the decades that followed. “You’re the Greatest Lover” has had a long afterlife of its own: it has been remixed repeatedly, and in 2000 the German act Loona recorded it, retitled “Latino Lover,” as a gold-selling hit across German-speaking Europe. Luv’ remains the best-selling Dutch girl group of all time — a group that began with a producer’s competitive hunch in front of a television set, and reached its peak with the song that proved the hunch correct.
