Yacht Or Not

Andrew Leci is ready to sail away, but needs some cool tunes to accompany him.

- Kenny Nguyen

WHILE I RECOGNISE the need to get out more and have an actual life, there is a game that a couple of friends and I like to play relating to music. It's a very specific type of music that is germane to this illustrious issue of Robb Report and, could be extremely useful for all you yachties out there for whom life on the ocean wave is interwoven into the fabric of existence.

I've known quite a lot of sailors in my life.

Now that I read this sentence back I sound like a port of call streetwalker, and that's really not what I meant. I was trying to convey the fact that I'm familiar with the sailing fraternity.

Now that I read this sentence back, I'm not sure at all that it's any better or less potentially salacious than the last. Let's move on.

Those who sail have always been a breed unto themselves - be they yacht owners, lessees or the individuals who work on board. To hear the call from the sea and to respond enthusiastically takes a special kind of person, and for these special people a musical genre (of sorts) was born.

I'm referring to 'yacht rock' - a term coined by a darning* of comedians self-indulging themselves on a Los Angeles-based web series back in the noughties. J D Ryznar, Hunter Stair and Lane Farnham came up with it as a fictional take on 'rockers' who actually drew breath and made music in the late 1970s and early 80s. Presumably it was music that they felt it appropriate to sail by, but in the last 17 years or so, the movement (if it can be called such) has taken on a bit of a life of its own, and the fact that my friends and I are speculating on what is 'yacht' and what is ‘not' tends to suggest that the concept has (sea) legs.