Richard Wright's 'Wet Dream' (1978): The Solo Album He Made While Pink Floyd Was Falling Apart

By 1978, Richard Wright was fading into the background of his own band. Pink Floyd was deep inside the Animals tour hangover, and Roger Waters was already sketching out The Wall — a concept that would eventually force Wright out. So Wright quietly slipped into Super Bear Studios in the South of France with a crew of session musicians and recorded Wet Dream, his first and only solo album. No band politics, no concept, just him and a jazz-fusion breeze.

Lyrically, Wet Dream is all escape and introversion. Wright wrote about the sea, sailing, and drifting — metaphors for wanting out of Pink Floyd’s increasingly dark orbit. The album’s cover even shows a lone figure on a beach. He wasn’t trying to make a statement about the band; he was just not making a Floyd album. Session guys like Mel Collins (sax), Snowy White (guitar), and Larry Steele (bass) gave it a loose, almost Canterbury-scene feel. Wright played every keyboard, sang every vocal, and produced it himself.

The irony is that Wet Dream is arguably the most relaxed album any Floyd member ever made, but it came out two years before The Wall — a record that would explicitly write Wright out of the