We Are Bodies

Dave Pen and Robin Foster first met through MySpace more than 15 years ago. It was the nascent algorithms that brought them together, with the bots frequently suggesting fans of Pen’s band Archive might like the music of Foster, and vice versa. “So we started spying on each other,” remembers Foster, an English musician who’s been based in Brittany for the best part of 15 years. “And then I received a message from Dave out of the blue suggesting we should meet up.”

Pen had been checking out Foster’s music and liked what he was hearing. “On his profile were the words ‘Englishman lost in France,’” remembers Pen, “and so I sent him a message saying: ‘I know what it feels like to be an Englishman lost in France.” Britain’s Archive, it transpires, are big across the channel, meaning Southampton’s Dave Pen has spent plenty of time adrift in L’hexagone since joining the progressive rock band in 1997. As luck would have it, Archive were about to perform in Quimper too, a mere 40-minute down the coast from Foster.

“So we met at this concert and he was playing in the middle of five or six reggae bands and everybody was hammered,” remembers Foster, laughing. “It was just really surreal.” The pair bonded over Pen’s Sheraton guitar, and not long after, they were sharing files and working on songs together.

It’s now been nine years since We Are Bodies released their eponymously-titled debut album, but they’re finally back with a bold follow up. //The Love Was All We Had// is full of searingly-anthemic songs like //Lost// and //Shallow Time// about dislocation and emotional turmoil. “A lot of the songs were written during the pandemic,” says Pen. “Nobody knew what was going to happen, but there was also a sense of hope in humanity in those songs.”

So why the delay? Aside from COVID-19, Pen has yet another band, Birdpen, while Foster writes soundtracks for Netflix’s //The Cursed// and Amazon’s //Truth Seekers//, among others. Still, if album no.2 has been a long time in coming, then it’s been well worth the wait. With big choruses and Foster’s distinctive guitar/delay sound, you could imagine their songs echoing across huge, ecstatic stadium crowds in 1986.

“It’s funny you should say that because I was reading a soundbite from Robert Smith yesterday and he was saying that humanity peaked in the 70s,” muses Foster. “I started calculating the age difference between me and him so I kind of figured that, for me, the peak of humanity would have been 1986.” Growing up, Foster always considered himself a post-punk fan, so he was surprised when people started telling him his music sounded proggy. “Somehow, I only started listening to Pink Floyd 15 years ago,” he reveals. “I could see what people meant”.

Pen, on the other hand, was exposed to the genre from an early age. “The first album I remember listening to was //The Dark Side Of The Moon// when I was seven,” he recalls. “My dad turned all the lights off in the lounge and we had the fire on. He was going through some kind of nervous breakdown when I was a kid, but music was his saviour. Listening to that whole album in the dark had quite an impact on me, so it’s all my dad’s fault that I ended up in a progressive rock group. That’s what I tell him.” JA

PROGFILE

Lineup: Dave Pen: vocals, Robin Foster: guitars, keyboards, programming, etc

Sounds like: Anthemic electro prog-pop that would have filled stadiums in 1986

Current release: //The Love Was All We Had// is out now on Wearebodiesmusic

Website: https://wearebodies.bandcamp.com/

— Jeremy Allen