Girl From Mars

Song Notes

Ash’s breakthrough single that peaked at number 11 in the UK singles charts. A classic Wheeler love song, there was a long-standing rumour that the song was originally entitled “Girl From Ards”, a place in Northern Ireland and written about a girl Tim went out with from there. However in a May, 2018 interview with the Times Tim Wheeler denied the claim.

The song was recorded during Easter 1995 and was the bands second session with producer Owen Morris. The song is always in Ash’s live set list, the band used to kick off their gigs with it during the Nu-Clear Sounds tour but it has since moved down.

Tim speaking to Team Rock about the track in 2016:

Our first hit, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary last month. I actually wrote this one when I was 16, two years before it came out. Our manager and record label didn’t want us to record it for Trailer because they thought it had hit potential and they didn’t want to waste that while we were still at school and wouldn’t be able to properly promote it. So once all the exams were done we put it out and it changed our lives for good.

The girls in Northern Ireland weren’t happening for me, but you can really romanticise someone from outer space, put them on a pedestal. I was into shit like Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, and as a kid I’d dream that my parents were Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. That’s why I loved David Bowie and the Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde album, because they had all these sci-fi references. Maybe it’s to do with growing up in such an isolated place. Downpatrick is 20 miles from Belfast and a bit of a rough town. The troubles were still going on in 1993 and it was still an edgy kind of place.

In my mind, the girl definitely wasn’t green, she looked normal. The people in Star Wars were just glamorous humans. To me it was more of a metaphor. The main thing behind it – and where the sense of yearning in the song comes from – was that I’d broken up with my first girlfriend. I’d fallen hard-core in love, it had fizzled out that summer, and I was still mourning that. At 16 I started getting depressed. I was a lovesick teenager.

I had made friends with some English kids and we’d smoke cigars and drink beer all night on the beach. I wasn’t trying to capture that spirit of coming of age, but it’s just in there because that’s exactly what was happening to me.

Some of the melodies were a bit Teenage Fanclub-ish. We were very much doing the pop-punk thing, but the solo was a remnant of my early days of being in really bad metal bands. The first rock band I got into was Thin Lizzy, and I’d been trying to copy Brian Robertson since I was 10, so I played this fast wah-wah lead. We’d write pop tunes, but we’d always try to get metal solos in there.

Tim Wheeler looking back on the song after twenty-five years in a February 2020 interview with Stereoboard:

I think there was a bit of Mars hanging over us. I was listening to Pixies, who were sci-fi obsessed. My sister is 18 years older than me and was a David Bowie fan in her teens. Our rehearsal room had been her den, and she’d written Life on Mars in huge letters on the wall. I think I also saw a film called Girl From Mars, or something, in a TV listing magazine. It was on at 4am so I never watched it, but I made my own story for the song.

I’d broken up with my first girlfriend, which was very intense, first love. I’d always been a happy child but for the first time was experiencing teenage angst, which I poured into the song. Aged 17, I was already nostalgic for those happier times. The previous summer, I’d gone on a family holiday to France. We met a bunch of cool kids and hung out on the beach, smoking cigars, which is where the line about “Henri Winterman cigars” comes from.

The first demo I did on my own sounds very much like a Teenage Fanclub song, mid tempo and jangly. When we played it as a band, we sped it up and it became more like the Buzzcocks. Live, it got a reaction straight away. After our manager discovered us and we signed to Infectious Records, they put us in the studio to record a mini-album, but specifically instructed us to not record “Girl From Mars”. They knew it had the potential to be a hit and wanted to hold it back until we’d left school and could promote it properly.