Gruppo Sportivo

Gruppo Sportivo is a Dutch post-punk / new wave pop band from The Hague, The Netherlands. Formed in 1976, they enjoyed modest international success in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The frontman and key writer of the band is the idiosyncratic Hans Vandenburg, who also released solo work. Gruppo Sportivo's debut single was Out There in the Jungle (Polydor, 1976), but the peak of their career came with the two Robert Jan Stips-produced albums 10 Mistakes and Back to 78, both released in 1978. Read more on Last.fm

Gruppo Sportivo is a Dutch post-punk / new wave pop band from The Hague, The Netherlands. Formed in 1976, they enjoyed modest international success in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The frontman and key writer of the band is the idiosyncratic Hans Vandenburg, who also released solo work. Gruppo Sportivo's debut single was Out There in the Jungle (Polydor, 1976), but the peak of their career came with the two Robert Jan Stips-produced albums 10 Mistakes and Back to 78, both released in 1978. They came to popularity just after the height of punk, but were regarded as more post-punk, veering more towards mainstream pop. They were much admired for their energetic, tongue in cheek, even slapstick-tinged live performances. Their biggest hit in their native Netherlands is Disco Really Made it (#11 in the Dutch Top 40 in 1978), but their most well-known song internationally is Beep Beep Love which enjoyed some modest success in both U.K. and U.S. The U.K.'s Radio & Records voted them 'Top Newcomer '78'. In July 2006 the Japanese girl band Puffy AmiYumi recorded a new version of Tokyo, a song originally recorded by Gruppo Sportivo in 1978. Gruppo Sportivo kept recording, releasing albums and performing on and off until December 2013, when the group announced and performed their final show in Haarlem, The Netherlands. However, they reformed in 2018 and released a new studio album the same year, titled Great. In the summer of 2021 they began recording new music, with - for the first time again in over 40 years - Robert Jan Stips as the producer. In 2026, fifty years after the band's inception, Vandenburg announced a final EP, entitled Talkshow and a 50th anniversary club tour that will be the band's last hurrah (and this time for real). Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.