The song's title is a British term for work-related illness or disease, a frequent subject in British news media at the time. The significance of the phrase was obscure to listeners in the United States, where the term
occupational disease is used instead. There is a double meaning in that, at the time, "industrial disease" referred to both an occupational illness and the decline of British industry. The background and subject matter of the lyrics was ostensibly the decline of the
British manufacturing industry in the early 1980s, describing
strikes,
clinical and
economic depression, and societal dysfunction. However, the song is an extended metaphor, with the idea of the dehumanising routine and repetition of the
nine-to-five itself as the real culprit of society's malaise. About halfway through the song, the narrator goes to the doctor, only to be told his own illness is diagnosed as
industrial disease. The double meaning is maintained, however, as the doctor is "Dr. Parkinson". Dr.
C. Northcote Parkinson, a British university professor of history also was the author of several popular satirical works on dysfunction in British institutions and organizations in the 1950s and 60s, of which the best known is
Parkinson's Law. A reference to "brewer's droop" as a medical condition is an in-joke, using a British colloquial term for alcohol-related
erectile dysfunction to allude to
Brewers Droop, a 1970s
pub rock band in which songwriter
Mark Knopfler and drummer
Pick Withers had played prior to Dire Straits. ==Charts==