Just behind the station   Before you reach the traffic island   A river runs through a concrete channel   I took you there once   I think it was after the Lead mill      The water was dirty and it smelt of industrialization   Little masters coughing their lungs up   And globules, the color of tomato ketchup   But it flows, yeah, it flows      Yeah, underneath the city   Through dirty brickwork conduits   Connecting white witches on the Moor   With Pre-Raphaelites, down in Broom hall      Beneath the old Trebor factory   That burnt down in the early seventies   Leaving an antiquated sweet-shop smell   And caverns of nougat and caramel   Nougat, yeah, nougat and caramel   And the river flows on      Yeah, the river flows on   Beneath pudgy fifteen year olds addicted to coffee whitener   Courting couples, naked on Northern Upholstery   And pensioners gathering dust like bowls of plastic tulips   And it finally comes above ground again at Forge Dam   The place where we first met      I went there again for old time's sake   Hoping to find the child's toy horse ride   That played such a ridiculously tragic tune   It was still there   But none of the kids seemed interested in riding it      And the cafe was still there too   The same press-in plastic letters on the price list   And scuffed Formica-top tables   I sat as close as possible to the seat   Where I'd met you that autumn afternoon      And then, after what seemed   Like hours of thinking about it   I finally took your face in my hands   And I kissed you for the first time   And a feeling like electricity flowed through my whole body      And I knew immediately   I'd entered a completely different world   And all the time, in the background   The sound of that ridiculously heartbreaking child's ride outside      At the other end of town   The river flows underneath an old railway viaduct   I went there with you once   Except you were somebody else   And we gazed down   At the sludgy brown surface of the water together      Then a passer by told us   That it used to be a local custom   To jump off the viaduct into the river   When coming home from the pub on a Saturday night      But that this custom had died out   When someone jumped and landed too near to the riverbank   And had sunk in the mud there and drowned   Before anyone could reach them      Maybe he'd just made the whole story up   You'd never get me to jump off that bridge   No chance, never in a million years      Yeah, a river flows underneath this city   I'd like to go there with you now, my pretty   And follow it on for miles and miles   Below other people's ordinary lives      Occasionally catching a glimpse of the moon   Through man-hole covers along the route   Yeah, it's dark sometimes but if you hold my hand   I think I know the way      Oh, this is as far as we got last time   But if we go just another mile   We will surface, surrounded by grass and trees   And that fly-over that takes the cars to cities   Buds that explode at the slightest touch   Nettles that sting but not too much      I've never been past this point   What lies ahead, I really could not say   And I used to live just by the river   In a dis-used factory, just off the Wicker   And the river flowed by, day after day   On one day I thought, "One day, I will follow it"      But that day never came   I moved away and lost track   But tonight, I am thinking   About making my way back   I may find you there and float on      Wherever the river may take me   Wherever the river may take me   Wherever the river may take us   Wherever it wants us to go   Wherever it wants us to go