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Fact #134233

When:

Short story:

Shortly after Saddam Hussein orders the invasion of Kuwait, Asia, student radio station KSDB-FM at Kansas State University plays Killing An Arab by The Cure. Listener protests will lead to the station making a formal apology and agreeing not to play the track again.

Full article:

Robert Smith (leader, The Cure) : The song was written in 1976, when I was 16. We used to play it in a pub in Crawley and it didn't seem that earth shattering at the time, and it seemed quite ludicrous to me that it suddenly became an issue last year. It was only when someone suggested that it was somehow some sort of publicity stunt that I thought, 'This has really gotten out of hand,' and that's when I asked for it to be withdrawn from airplay, just to make it obvious that we had no interest in perpetuating it as an onrunning issue. It was just unfortunate that the real world intruded.

It was a compromise, really, but one that was forced on us," says Smith. "There were other ways out of it, but they all would have been more painful for us. We could have insisted that everything stay as it was, but I had to make a gesture that people would understand. I just despaired, really, that I had to step in and explain, and I got very annoyed at Elektra's initial suggestion that they delete the song but keep selling the album, which we refused to do. I said that they could delete the album if they wanted to, but they couldn't take the song off.
(Source : Interview by Harold De Muir, Eastcoast Rocket, July 22, 1987)