The Cure – Killing An Arab

A Camus single on Small Wonder, December 1978

Killing an Arab was recorded on 20 September 1978 and released in late December as the Cure’s first single. Manager Chris Parry wanted it out before Christmas, to follow a run of dates that had included a short, unhappy support slot with Generation X. Fiction, the label he was starting, was not ready to distribute, so he licensed about 15,000 copies to Small Wonder, the Walthamstow independent. Most of the weekly music papers reviewed the record in early January 1979. In February, Fiction reissued it as FICS 001, the label’s first release. The B-side was 10:15 Saturday Night. The single runs 2 minutes 21 seconds. Parry produced it.

The band on the record is the trio: Robert Smith on guitar and vocal, Michael Dempsey on bass, Lol Tolhurst on drums. Porl Thompson had already left. The lyric follows a scene in Albert Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger, published in French as L’Étranger. On a beach, in hard light, the narrator Meursault shoots a man. Smith said the man in the book happened to be Arab, and that the point was the empty act, not a target. Fiction even sent copies of the novel out with early pressings so the reference would be hard to miss.

The record itself is plain. A short guitar figure, Dempsey’s bass, Tolhurst’s drums, Smith singing almost flat, no chorus built to lift a crowd. It does not sound like the later Cure of long echoes and lipstick. It sounds like a 1978 single from a Crawley trio that had just left the pub circuit. The song later opened the American set of Boys Don’t Cry in 1980 and sat on the 1986 singles collection Standing on a Beach, whose title Smith took from the first line.