Ironically, I found his bass playing always perfunctory, technically perfect, but perfunctory! I hear nothing daring, happy-go-lucky and inspired like in Chris Squire's sonic Ric attacks in it. To me, Lake put all emotion in his voice (and his acoustic guitar playing), but not in his bass playing which was more of an afterthought to him. He was not "naturally over-busy, yet groovy" like Geddy Lee either, I always thought that his bass parts sounded like Keith Emerson wrote them out for him. A bit dead really.
I listen to a lot of ELP lately, but nothing Lake ever did on bass puts a grin on my face. He does what the overtly complex music requires and fills the space Emerson (50%) and Palmer (35%) left for him competently. That's not knocking him, I think that was kind of their mutual musical agreement right from the start, Lake (a guitarist at heart) did not join them to play bass, he played bass because the other two thought they needed a bass player for their trio concept.
I also hear none of the playfulness in Lake's playing that is so evident in what Jack Bruce does here (in a piece of music not entirely dissimilar to what ELP did):
But I'm not saying that he is not an excellent technical player!