The following news story appeared on the T&M homepage:

   TIME & MATTER RECORDS PROUDLY ANNOUNCE...  

 A BRAND NEW URBAN DOGS 7" SINGLE: 'REBELLION SONG' 

MATTHEW BEST BACK IN THE LINE-UP

 TWO BRILLIANT NEW TRACKS RECORDED 

Urban Dogs mainstays Charlie Harper and Knox are back!

After their last fantastic release, the critically acclaimed acoustic ‘Bonefield’ album on Time & Matter Records, we are pleased to announce that Time & Matter will be scheduling the brand new vinyl-only single by the Urban Dogs for release later in the year.

Recorded at Pat Collier’s Perry Vale Studios in London on the 9th and 10th of July 2014, the Urban Dogs are once again joined by original drummer Matthew Best on two tracks, entitled ‘Rebellion Song’ and ‘One Foot In The Grave’.

Produced by Charlie himself, with Pat Collier as engineer, the new Urban Dogs line-up is:

Charlie Harper: Vocals / Guitar
Knox: Vocals / Lead Guitar
Pat Collier: Bass
Mathew Best: Drums / Backing Vocals

A Knox painting of an 'Urban Dog' will feature as the single's cover, which will also include an insert, with lyrics. Current plans are for the single to be a limited edition of 500 hand numbered copies, on coloured vinyl with the T&M catalogue number yet to be finalised!

As a taster for this forthcoming exciting release here is a mini-review…

Rebellion Song (3:31)

Charlie Harper takes the vocal duties on this outstanding song about the will of the people to keep writing ‘the Rebellion song’ in reaction to the destruction caused by war-mongering leaders. Singing about believing in “creative rebellion”, this mid-tempo instant classic with a catchy chorus rides throughout on some fabulous soaring guitar work.

Key lyric: “…born in a war-torn land, raised with a gun in my hand, where the victors write the history, we write Rebellion song…”

One Foot In The Grave (3:33)

“No one can save me now as far as I can see”, Knox sings on this up-tempo dazzling Urban Dogs number, with haunting deep murmured backing harmonies. With some world-weary Knox political commentary on the rich and the poor, which provides perfect symbiosis with Harper’s ‘Rebellion Song’, there’s also a parallel personal commentary on mortality infused into this song via Knox’s dark humour.

Key lyric: “…thousands of years of politics, but the poor are still the poor…”

U.K. Subs fans, Vibrators fans, Urban Dogs aficionados et al can rejoice that this dynamic duo are back, better than ever, and snarling and howling to their fans’ content.

Time & Matter quizzed Knox further about his song and he revealed that “…I don’t remember the circumstances of writing “One Foot In The Grave”, it was quite a while ago. I looked it up and I made my original home demo of the song on 15 August 1986. I sort of write and demo songs pretty much continuously and every now and again I’ll look over some old demos and see if they’re alright for whatever I’m doing. Usually I’ll make a new demo as the original ones are often too rough or embarrassing to actually play to anyone! One thing I like about the song is that it’s a rant and the vocal just goes on and on with no guitar solo or break, so it’s slightly unusual in that respect. Recording at Pat Collier’s studio (Perry Vale Studios near Forest Hill) was very easy, especially as drummer Matthew is a good attention to detail person. I was a bit worried about playing the guitar as I hadn’t really played it at all for ages, but it all came back to me, (well what there was of it), and the ends of my fingers, which were like jelly, held up OK. I took some plasters to the studio just in case!...”

T&M also spoke to returning Dogs drummer Matthew Best about how he returned to the fold: “… well Charlie just phoned me up out of the blue and asked if I'd be interested in getting together to record a single and I said yes.  There wasn't much more to it than that.  We didn't rehearse, we didn't even meet up beforehand.  Knox sent me a demo of his song the day before we went into the studio, but I didn't hear Charlie's song until I got there. Everything seemed to click pretty well and we got both drum tracks down quickly and then went on to do the rest of the overdubs.  Both songs were arranged, recorded and mixed in just less than two days, thanks largely to Pat Collier's quick work in the studio - he doesn't mess about!  It was fantastic to see Knox and Charlie again as we had quite a bit of catching up to do. There is talk of more too, as we were pretty unanimous that we'd love to do another one…”

And finally, T&M spoke to the main man Charlie Harper about the new Dogs recordings, which he enthused are "...very exciting". Regarding 'Rebellion Song', Charlie revealed that "I wrote the song in preparation for the new U.K. Subs 'Y' album, but it just had more of an Urban Dogs feel to it. The song quickly developed after I was playing the guitar, learning some easy Jazz chords. Suddenly, whilst playing, some lyrics popped into my head which were 'Are you pointing a gun to my head...' I immediately felt that the words went well with those chords that I had and the rest really flowed easily, I actually wrote around 10 verses pretty much straight off, but then whittled them down afterwards. We are all very pleased with how it's all turned out..."

All pictures in this news story were kindly supplied by Matthew Best - cheers Matthew!