This has long been one of my favorite Billy Bragg songs. It's so dark. A melodramatic rendering of an affair, for sure, in which a couple of images from Genesis are evoked: the Land of Cain (a.k.a. Land of Nod), the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden.
My guess is that the singer is addressing his wife, admitting that he's betrayed her by having an affair with another woman in the marital bedroom. "Dancing disgusting" = sex, and "flushing our babies down the drain" = the sperm he's wasting on sex with this other woman, perhaps literally flushed away in a condom, and at any rate won't be used to create a baby with his wife. Perhaps the other woman is a next-door neighbor, since he talks about growing up in awe of the girl next door. I think it's elliptical on purpose, but it's fun to speculate.
This has long been one of my favorite Billy Bragg songs. It's so dark. A melodramatic rendering of an affair, for sure, in which a couple of images from Genesis are evoked: the Land of Cain (a.k.a. Land of Nod), the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden.
My guess is that the singer is addressing his wife, admitting that he's betrayed her by having an affair with another woman in the marital bedroom. "Dancing disgusting" = sex, and "flushing our babies down the drain" = the sperm he's wasting on sex with this other woman, perhaps literally flushed away in a condom, and at any rate won't be used to create a baby with his wife. Perhaps the other woman is a next-door neighbor, since he talks about growing up in awe of the girl next door. I think it's elliptical on purpose, but it's fun to speculate.