Killing an Arab

The band's first single was recorded at the same time as the first album but left off it, and it appeared on the American album Boys Don't Cry. Chris Parry produced it. Smith said it was a short poetic attempt to condense the key moments of Albert Camus's 1942 novel The Stranger, in which the narrator shoots an Arab on a beach. Melody Maker compared its Moorish-flavoured guitar pattern to the oriental riff of the Banshees' Hong Kong Garden. Two lines gave the titles of the compilation Standing on a Beach and its video counterpart Staring at the Sea.

The title brought charges of promoting violence against Arabs. Smith told NME in 1978 that it was not a call to kill Arabs. When Standing on a Beach appeared in the United States in 1986, it carried a sticker warning against racist use of the song, after a student DJ at WPRB Princeton introduced it offensively on air in October 1986. Smith said in 2003 that, knowing what he knows now, he would have called it Standing on the Beach.

Live

The words have changed on stage. In 2005 the band sang Kissing an Arab, in 2006 Smith added an opening verse and called it Killing Another, and in 2011 the Reflections tour used Killing an Ahab. On the 40th anniversary tour the original title returned, and the final show of the tour in December 2022 closed with Killing Another.