Songfacts®:

• This song is about someone who has killed an Arab on a beach and is thinking about it in retrospect, observing the body.
• This was inspired by Albert Camus' book The Stranger (also known as The Outsider). It is not a racist song, but still caused a lot of controversy because many people assumed so because of the title. The book deals with existentialism, and the title "Killing An Arab" was taken from a passage where the main character thinks about the emptiness of life after killing a man on a beach for reasons he can't explain.
  
  Camus published The Stranger in 1942. In 1957, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1960 at age 46.
• The Cure grew up in the rough-hewn town of Crawley, England, where their brooding lyrics and gothic look (make-up!) wasn't always welcome.
  
  This song came at a time when the National Front, a group whose rallying cry was "Keep England White," was on the rise. At some shows, disaffected youth associated with the group (often skinheads) showed up at Cure shows to sing along with a misinterpreted "Killing An Arab," only to learn that the group was about the introspective and sensitive side of punk rock ("Boys Don't Cry" was especially horrifying). The Cure took plenty of verbal abuse ("Poofs!"), but there were no major incidents of violence associated with the song, and during one show at The Nashville Room in London, The Cure won them over. "Soon all the skinheads were dancing to 'Boys Don't Cry,'" drummer Lol Tolhurst wrote in his 2016 memoir, Cured. "Robert looked around at me and grinned broadly."
• This was the Cure's first single. They were signed to the German label Hansa when they first recorded the song, but the label wanted nothing to do with it. Instead of pivoting in a new musical direction to please Hansa, The Cure asked for their release, and in a savvy business move, also asked for the rights to "Killing An Arab" and other songs they recorded for the label. Hansa thought very little of these songs, so in the termination agreement they gave back rights to the songs.
  
  Now label-less, the band sent out copies of their demo tape, which contained "Killing An Arab," "Boys Don't Cry," "10:15 Saturday Night" and "It's Not You." The only interest came from Chris Parry, who was working at Polydor but was starting his own label, Fiction Records. The Cure agreed to sign with Fiction, and recorded new versions of "Killing An Arab" and "10:15 Saturday Night," which were released as a double A-side single, which was first distributed by the independent label Small Wonder and then issued on Fiction.
  
  Thus began a long and fruitful collaboration between Fiction Records and The Cure. The label gave the band a great deal of freedom which allowed them to break new ground in the alternative rock genre. Chris Parry produced their first single and their first album, Three Imaginary Boys, but then allowed Robert Smith to assume most of the production duties and take creative control of the band.
• Predictably, this song led to protests from groups that didn't understand it. When The Cure played a show at Kingston Polytechnic in 1979, the student union told them not to play the song. Robert Smith worked it out by explaining the literary origins of the song to a group of students, and the song was included in the set.
• In a Songfacts interview with Cure co-founder Lol Tolhurst, he said of this song, "It was about alienation and existentialism - things more relevant to us then. Obviously events of the last two decades have changed the perception of the song's meaning. Totally erroneously I might add, as it has nothing to do with racism or killing at all."
• The title of The Cure singles collection Standing On A Beach is also a reference to the passage in Albert Camus' book where this song title came from. The 1986 compilation, also known as Staring At The Sea, exposed American audiences to The Cure's earlier work, and in turn revived the old controversy surrounding "Killing An Arab."
  
  The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who claimed that racist deejays were using the single to stoke anti-Arab sentiment in the US, launched a campaign to pressure the record label to remove the track from the collection. Robert Smith refused, but he did agree to write a conciliatory message that was displayed on the album cover: "The song 'Killing An Arab' has absolutely no racist overtones whatsoever. It is a song which decries the existence of all prejudice and consequent violence. The Cure condemn its use in furthering anti-Arab feeling."
• In the weeks following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Robert Smith was in the hot seat once again over The Cure's seminal tune. "If there's one thing I would change, it's the title," he told Chart Attack in October 2001. "I wrote it when I was still in school and I had no idea that anyone would ever listen to it other than my immediate school friends.
  
  One of the themes of the song is that everyone's existence is pretty much the same. Everyone lives, everyone dies, our existences are the same. It's as far from a racist song as you can write. It seems though that no one can get past the title and that's incredibly frustrating.
  
  The fact is it's based on a book that's set in France and deals with the problems of the Algerians, so it was only geographical reasons why it was an Arab and not anyone else."
• The Cure occasionally performed this under the alternate title "Killing Another" to avoid the inevitable misinterpretation of the song's meaning. During their 2011 Reflections Tour, they performed it as "Killing An Ahab," with lyrics inspired by Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick.
• As a companion to Standing On A Beach, The Cure released a collection of their music videos, including a new clip for this single (which previously didn't have a video). The black-and-white video captures John Button, the retired fisherman featured on the album cover, in moments of quiet contemplation on a winter's day. It was shot in Rye, a small coastal town in East Sussex, where Button lived.