A new bassist, a quieter register and one of the band’s best-loved albums. Kayak in 1975 stopped trying to impress and started trying to persuade.

The short version

Issued as a gatefold LP on EMI in 1975, ‘Royal Bed Bouncer’ is the first Kayak album with Bert Veldkamp on bass in place of Cees van Leeuwen. It was also picked up for release in the United States, a rare step for a Dutch prog band of the period. The single ‘Chance for a Lifetime’ reached the Dutch top twenty. Years later the album was the subject of a television documentary feature that helped push the band toward reforming.

The album that came back to find them

Most mid-seventies albums stay where they were left. This one did not: a television programme built around it, made long after the fact, is documented as part of what led toward the band’s return at the end of the nineties. That afterlife says something about the record’s standing at home. Musically, the change of bassist matters less than the change of temperature. Ton Scherpenzeel adds double bass to his own credits, horn and violin arrangements appear under his direction, and the whole album sits at a lower dynamic level than either of its predecessors, without losing the melodic density that defines the band.

The sound

This is restrained, chamber-toned symphonic prog. Reviewers reach repeatedly for words like mellow and understated, and the record earns them: the arrangements are string- and horn-tinted, the tempos are moderate, and Max Werner sings more conversationally than before. What stops it becoming soft is conviction — progressive rock reviewers who love the album single out how committed the playing is within its narrow dynamic range, while those who dislike it call it conventional and unchallenging. Both are describing the same quality. It is the most European-sounding album the band made in this period, and the least indebted to British models.

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The songs

The title track opens the album and is its most immediately assertive piece. ‘Chance for a Lifetime’ was the single and reached the Dutch top twenty, and it shows how neatly the band could compress their manner into three minutes. ‘Said No Word’ is the longest track here at a shade over five minutes, which tells you how far Kayak had moved from the extended writing of the previous album. The record works cumulatively rather than through peaks, and those three are the clearest way in.

Reception and legacy

This is one of the most divisive albums in the catalogue and one of the most defended. Progressive rock listeners who rate it highly describe it as restrained but utterly convinced, with a personality of its own; detractors find it conventional. It sold well enough at home to keep the band’s momentum, produced a genuine hit single, and was released in North America. Its later television afterlife gave it a second reputation that few 1975 prog albums enjoy.

The verdict

Approach this one expecting persuasion rather than spectacle. It is the Kayak album for a quiet evening: melodic, warm, carefully arranged and completely unhurried. Newcomers drawn to the band by the bigger keyboard writing of the first two albums may find it underpowered at first, and it does take a few listens to reveal itself. Stay with it and it becomes the record many long-time listeners name as their favourite, and the strongest argument that Kayak were a songwriting band that happened to play prog rather than the other way round.

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