Yacht rock – the genre you had no idea you knew so well

Here’s the first thing you need to know about yacht rock: even if you’ve never heard of it, you probably know every song.

The second thing you need to know: it doesn’t really have anything to do with yachts, or the sea, except in your imagination. It’s the kind of music you might picture yourself listening to if you were very rich, rather idle and drifting through a cocaine-and-weed party on a boat off Catalina in 1977.

Melbourne band Yacht Rock Revival. Credit: Eddie Jim

In other words, it’s a feeling as much as a music genre, one explored in depth in HBO’s new film Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, screening now in Australia on Binge.

It’s 1970s smooth California cool, finding its purest expression in songs (What a Fool Believes; Steal Away; Rosanna; Africa; Sailing; Baby Come Back) and performers (the Doobie Brothers; Steely Dan; Kenny Loggins; Christopher Cross; George Benson) whose blend of soft rock, R&B, jazz and pop dominated the charts from the mid-1970s to the early ’80s.

It’s also the music Melbourne singer Susan Marsden grew up hearing on the radio and on Countdown as a kid in the ’70s (full disclosure: Marsden is my singing teacher). Fifty years later, she is leading the local embrace of a genre that has exploded in the US in recent years.

Marsden has navigated her eight-piece band Yacht Rock Revival through these luminous musical waters for four years, bringing to fruition a dream that began before she even knew “yacht rock” had been christened as its own genre in its American birthplace.

“Our biggest battle is explaining to people what it is,” she says. “Everyone knows the songs, but they say, ‘what is it? What is yacht rock?’”

More and more people know the answer. Thousands have flocked to the band’s gigs around Melbourne, and occasionally in Brisbane and Sydney, in recent years. The band even makes an appearance in the documentary, which explores the revival of a genre first celebrated in a satirical web series in the 2010s.

It was that little show, an affectionate piss-take, that gave the genre its name. Today, it has its own radio stations and a growing number of tribute bands. And while many of those bands (such as Yacht Rock Revival and an LA group called Yachtly Crew) gently satirise the accoutrements of the genre – loud shirts, short skirts, captain’s hats – the music itself is too sophisticated for mucking around.

“That’s where we take it very seriously, the music side of it,” Marsden says. “I wasn’t going to compromise on that at all. Not that we compromise on anything else, but it is a bit silly when we’re putting fake moustaches on. And the Captain out of the Captain and Tennille was the only guy in the era wearing a captain’s hat.”

Peter Newmarch, the band’s lead male singer, says the quality of the musicianship is what sets this apart from just another hokey tribute show.

“It’s really clever music, so it’s very satisfying to play,” he says. “It’s easy to take the mickey out of, but you’ve got to play it well. You can’t take a passing shot at those tunes.”

Exactly what makes a song “yacht rock” is the subject of fierce debate, and if you ask your favourite music streamer for a playlist you’ll see why. Fleetwood Mac? Almost, but no. The Eagles? No. Hall and Oates? Depends. The website Yacht Or Nyacht tries to settle the debate with a yacht rock purity scale (What a Fool Believes is the gold standard, scoring a perfect 100).

It’s a challenge Yacht Rock Revival’s Jeremy Diffey (sax, keyboards, vocals) faced when he composed the band’s first original song, Love on the Horizon, due for release in the new year.

“I took a lot of the key elements of the yacht rock songs we love, the piano [signature] and the way that bounces around, and some of the synthesiser sounds and percussion … it’s still my sound, but it’s got that vibe.”

For Marsden and her band (an elite crew of musicians rounded out by Fabrizio Giorgio, Javier Fredes, Robert Powell, Thomas Petrasek and Aynsley Green), that vibe is one they hope to ride to even bigger things in 2025, with a wave of fans who understand music is as much about how it makes you feel as how it sounds.

“I remember hearing What a Fool Believes on the radio and how happy it made me feel,” Marsden recalls of her youth. “And I kept searching out songs that made me feel good and that I knew would make the audience feel good as well. They remember what car they were driving when they first heard that song on the radio. That’s what it captures.”