Girl From Mars

Ash frontman Tim Wheeler wrote this song after breaking up with one of his first girlfriends. His heart is easily broken, which has proved inspiration for many of his songs over the years.

The band members were still students at Down High School in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland when Wheeler wrote this song (he was 16). They had it ready for their first release, a 1994 EP called Trailer, but they held the song back for their first proper album, 1977, so they could properly promote it. The song became the first of their 18 Top 40 hits in the UK, but it didn't catch on in America, where Ash never made an impact.

Ash made three different videos for this song. The first one used a solarized video effect to simulate Mars as the band played on a beach. This one had no chance of getting on MTV, so they did one with a storyline, showing a little girl wandering through a strange museum. This one had much better production value, but MTV didn't bite. The third video, released in 2020, re-imagines the first visual as an interstellar transmission picked up by a space agency. The clip nods heavily towards the Rosalind Franklin Mars Rover's mission to search for the existence of past life on the red planet.