In the sweltering summer of 1995, sci-fi-loving, Northern Irish indie-rock trio Ash (Tim Wheeler – vocals and guitar; Mark Hamilton – bass, and drummer Rick McMurray), rocketed to just outside of the UK top ten with their infectious indie/punk-pop anthem Girl from Mars.
Their previous single, Kung Fu, which was a thrilling, two-minute, Ramones-like homage to martial arts movies, had only reached number 57 in the charts, but Girl from Mars took them into the big time, hitting the radio just as Wheeler and Hamilton (who were both 18) were finishing their A-levels.
It proved that the Undertones weren’t the only Northern Irish outfit who knew how to get their teenage kicks with a joyous and energetic guitar pop tune.
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Opening with some acoustic guitar strumming, Wheeler’s youthful yet wistful vocals asked us if we remembered the time that he knew a girl from Mars. Before going on to remind us of the tale…
We’d stay up late playing cards, Henri Winterman cigars
And she never told me her name
I still love you, the girl from Mars
With a shriek of feedback, the whole song then exploded, roaring and accelerating into a delirious, fuzzy monster.
As the song progressed, Wheeler further recalled this whirlwind summer romance with a mysterious female alien, where there’s ‘electricity in the air’ and ‘a strange light shimmering over the sea’. Tim remembers the two star-crossed lovers spending the evening ‘Twisting all through the night on the terrace.”
Sadly, so soon after she’s arrived from space, the object of Wheeler’s desire was on her way back to Mars, and Wheeler was left staring forlornly at the stars…
Was it just a dream… and was she really from Mars?
Girl from Mars is a brilliant fusion of teenage lust, adolescent heartbreak and sci-fi romanticism that ignited indie club dance-floors and festival mosh pits that halcyon summer of 1995 and long beyond.
Wheeler wrote the song – the second single released in advance of Ash’s number one, platinum-selling 1996 debut album, 1977 – in his bedroom at the family home in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.
Part of the inspiration came from his love of sci-fi (underlined by the album’s Star Wars release year-referencing title) which was also shared by US band Pixies.
Wheeler was an avid fan of the Boston legends, particularly their 1991 album, Trompe le Monde, which thematically had one foot in the quirkier side of UFO conspiracy theories…
“I loved Trompe le Monde – it was such a cool record”, Wheeler tells MusicRadar, adding: “It [the idea for the song] also came from Bowie and Star Wars. My sister is 18 years older than me – she was into Bowie, and her and her friend had written ‘Life on Mars’ on the wall of our rehearsal room, which had also been her den when she was a kid. So, right from our very first rehearsal, Mars was always hanging over our heads.”
He adds: “I was also looking at the TV listings and there was a film called The Girl from Mars, which was on at two or three in the morning. I didn’t watch it, or bother to tape it, but as soon as I saw the title, my mind went off and I imagined this whole story without ever seeing the film. I think it was a made-for-TV film – I’ve still never seen it. I thought it was such a good song title, and I knew I had to write a song about it.”
Another inspiration for Girl from Mars was teenage angst, which Wheeler was experiencing after breaking up with his first girlfriend. “I’d had a blissful year being 15 – I had my first girlfriend and Ash had got together,” he recalls.
“All of a sudden, we’d gone from being a real laughing stock [heavy metal] band called Vietnam, who were having disastrous gigs, but, suddenly, Ash coalesced – our ability kicked in and all the songs got better. I was really happy when I was 15, but things fell apart when I was 16 and I think I was going through depression – I broke up with my girlfriend and, after that rush of the band coming together, I wasn’t sure if things were going to happen with it.
“I was listening to Joy Division and The Smiths – that was the stuff that really spoke to me – but, at the same time, I’d seen Teenage Fanclub open for Nirvana [at the King’s Hall, Belfast] in 1992, and Ioved their melodies and beautiful chords, so I was channelling that when I wrote Girl from Mars.
“I was sort of writing about missing my first girlfriend and missing those euphoric feelings from the year before. I’d also been to France on caravan holidays with my family and little bits of the lyrics came from those trips – we’d found some cool kids to hang out with, buy tiny Kronenbourg beers and drink them on the beach. One time we found some Henri Winterman cigars, so that memory snuck into the lyrics.”
Sadly, Ash never got offered a sponsorship deal from Dutch cigar brand Henri Winterman, but, amazingly, Girl from Mars did end up being used as the telephone hold music for NASA! “That was the year it came out – I thought that was genius,” says Wheeler. “Hopefully it brightened up some people’s day, although I’m not sure who would be calling NASA.”
As well as a failed extraterrestrial romance and teenage angst, Girl from Mars is also about escapism – getting away from grey and rain-soaked Northern Ireland to visit sunnier climes.
“I guess it’s a real summer song. We’d spent most of my childhood summers going to Kerry in southwest Ireland, where we had great times, but when we went to France the weather was guaranteed to be amazing all summer. I was loving that and that fed into the song too,” says Wheeler.
Tim remembers writing Girl from Mars on a 1977 Fender Stratocaster, telling us: “I only had two guitars; I didn’t have an acoustic. I had a [Gibson] Explorer copy – I think the brand was called Artist, and it was a cheap little guitar that came with a practice amp – but for my sixteenth birthday I got a ’77 Strat for £250. Someone was selling it in the listings of our local newspaper. So, by the time I was writing Girl from Mars, I’d switched to the ’77 Strat, which was my main guitar, so I’m pretty sure I would’ve written it on that.”
The initial 4-track demo of Girl from Mars that Wheeler recorded before the band was let loose on the song is very different from the final version – it’s a jangly, mid-tempo effort and sounds a lot like its earliest musical influence, Teenage Fanclub, rather than a punky-power-pop anthem.
“That demo shows how I was seeing it to start with – a dreamy little song. I used to borrow the school’s 4-track, it was nice of them to lend it to me,” remembers Tim.
“We also used to record demos at this little studio in Strangford [Northern Ireland]. The guy there had a copycat WEM tape delay unit, which was kind of in bits, but he’d lend it to me, so I made a little sci-fi intro and outro with delay echoes – it was my first sketch and it was unusual because I didn’t often bother recording demos of songs, but with that one I felt an urge. Once we started playing it with the band, it got pumped up and sped up – there was a big jump from the demo and it took on a kind of Buzzcocks quality, which is funny because I hadn’t really listened to the Buzzcocks. I knew Nirvana were into them… Years later, we did gigs with the Buzzcocks and I was like, ‘My God, there are a lot of similarities…’ Nice chords and nice melodies, high energy and high speed.
“Once we started playing the song in rehearsals, we transformed it, and when we started playing it at gigs quite soon after that, I can remember that people would say, ‘Oh, I really like that song…’ They were singling it out at gigs, and so were close friends whose taste we trusted. That took me by surprise – I did really like the song but right from the start it was connecting with people. We’d had that with a couple of songs before but not to that level.”
Someone who had an early input into the song was Wheeler’s younger brother, Pat. “I always tried my songs out on him because his bedroom was next to mine, so if I’d written something and I was excited about it, I’d play it to him,” says Wheeler. “He’s a guy who is always encouraging and gives good feedback – he ended up being an architect, so he’s a creative spirit as well. He would offer up cool ideas – on Girl from Mars, he said I should do a quiet breakdown. That’s always been a great part of the song, especially live, it’s amazing.”
To our ears, the killer melodic guitar solo in Girl from Mars sounds like it has a Dinosaur Jr. influence, and Wheeler agrees: “Yeah – Dinosaur Jr. were a big influence on us. Right from the start of Ash, at our first rehearsal, we attempted a cover of The Wagon. I loved his [J Mascis’s] soloing. A few years before Ash, I’d wanted to be a metal kid and I was trying to solo, but I wasn’t technically very good. I liked fast bits and solos and showing off. So, when I discovered Dinosaur Jr. I was like, ‘oh – this guy has the technique, and he gets very exploratory, like Neil Young, but you can also hear a metal influence in there’. J Mascis is definitely a big influence on my solos.”
Girl from Mars shares thematic and sonic similarities with that other great punky power-pop song about interstellar romance, Another Girl, Another Planet, by late ‘70s English New Wave band, The Only Ones, which, coincidentally, also features a brilliant melodic guitar solo.
“Yeah – that’s awesome,” says Wheeler. “I’m not sure I’d heard that song at the time, but when Girl from Mars came out, I remember Bernard Butler saying that it was the modern-day version of Another Girl, Another Planet, and he meant that in a good way. So, that sent me off in search of the song and I was like, ‘Oh my God…’ ”
Wheeler had written Girl from Mars ahead of Ash making their 1994 mini-album Trailer for label Infectious Records, but recognising the surefire hit potential of the song, the band were advised by their manager and their label to hold off from recording it and to save it for their debut album proper.
“When we signed with the label, they’d heard Girl from Mars at our gigs and they knew it had hit potential, and our manager, Tav [Stephen ‘Tav’ Taverner], knew it right from the start. He was like, ‘That’s a hit, but let’s not record that for anything [yet]’. So, when we did our first Peel Session and our mini-album, we held it back,” says Wheeler.
“Between Tav and the label, they knew the song could be a hit but for it to be a hit you needed to be available to promote the hell out of it, but we probably weren’t ready for that and we didn’t have the time because we were still finishing school. So, in the end, the song came out a month after we’d left school.”
The initial recording sessions for Girl from Mars took place at the legendary Rockfield Studios, in Monmouthshire, Wales, where classic rock acts like Queen and Black Sabbath had made records – Oasis recorded almost all of their 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? there with producer, Owen Morris, who was also at the controls for Girl from Mars. Morris went on to produce Ash’s album 1977, which was also mostly made at Rockfield.
“We recorded the rest of the album six months after Girl from Mars came out. As far as I remember, we recorded Girl from Mars in the Easter holidays in 1995 – we went to Rockfield for a few days,” remembers Wheeler. “It was amazing – we’d done a session at Loco Studios [in South Wales] at Christmas [1994], where we did [the singles] Angel Interceptor and Kung Fu, but things were going well, so the label spent a bit more money on us to go to a fancier studio. Owen was in Rockfield a lot around that time, doing (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”
“Rockfield was a nice residential studio – every room was en-suite with a jacuzzi and each room had a nice TV and there was catering; it was a very cool experience. I remember Owen got a nice groove [on Girl from Mars] – there was just a little bit of swing in it, and he made sure we didn’t race off too much with the tempo. He allowed it to be fast but with a little bit of a groove to it. I think he added something really cool. He also added some feedback drones behind it, almost like Eno, Fripp and Visconti on Heroes [by David Bowie]. Then he mixed the song and we went back to school to get ready for our A-levels.”
However, Morris’s mix was ultimately deemed as not being up to scratch.
“Between everyone, we thought it wasn’t quite as good as it could’ve been. It had a slight darkness to it – it wasn’t quite as poppy – and there were bits of my vocals that I didn’t like,” explains Wheeler. “There were a few little things that I wanted to tweak and add. I’d been listening to a lot of Beach Boys, and I wanted to add some timpani, and, between the label and our manager, they wanted someone else to have a crack at the mix.”
That someone turned out to be Phil Thornalley, who’d produced The Cure’s 1982 gloom-fest Pornography and had played bass for Robert Smith’s goth-rock outfit, but was also known for his production, engineering and mixing work with acts including Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, XTC, Psychedelic Furs and Prefab Sprout – after working with Ash, he went on to produce Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 hit single Torn, which he also co-wrote.
“So, we went in with Phil Thornalley – I can’t remember when we did that; it must’ve been on a weekend and it was around the time of our school exams. It was pretty hectic and I don’t think we told Owen,” says Wheeler. “We were going in to do another mix of it and we added a few elements. I think I replaced the electric guitar in the intro and the breakdown with an acoustic, and we added timpani. There was a sax player who came in to do some stuff, but you can only really hear that in the outro.
“We did the additional recording and the mix at RAK Studios, in London, and then we had to do some B-sides: Astral Conversations with Toulouse-Lautrec and Cantina Band [from Star Wars]. I think at some point Phil Thornalley walked out of the session because he got pissed off about something. Maybe he thought it was ridiculous that we were doing Cantina Band or that Astral Conversations didn’t have enough of a song – it was quite experimental… I don’t know. So, Phil walked out of the session, but Owen was in town, so he came down and helped us mix Cantina Band, but, in the meantime, he found out that we’d gone behind his back and done the other version [of Girl from Mars]. It’s amazing that he came back in and helped us to finish it, but he was pissed off with us for a long time about that. It was quite mad, but I was just 18 and I was trying to keep everyone happy.”
When the new version of Girl from Mars was sent out to radio stations its infectious hyperactive energy resulted in massive amounts of airplay. It peaked just outside of the top ten – at number 11 – in the UK singles chart, becoming Ash’s first top 40 hit. It also reached number 16 in the Irish singles chart too.
“In those days, your single would go to radio about six weeks before it would come out. So, I think during the last couple weeks of me doing my exams, it was starting to get heavy radio play, and that’s one of the reasons it became such a big hit – stations like Radio 1 hammered it, and so did MTV,” says Wheeler.
“We did a video straight after leaving school. I used to get in the car, drive home from school, and hear Girl from Mars on Radio 1 in the daytime – that was a buzz like no other. When I was doing my A-levels, I also had to do lots of Australian phone interviews, as things were kicking off for us in Australia.”
Two days after he finished his A-levels, Ash played Glastonbury, but despite Wheeler pursuing his rock ‘n’ roll dream during his studies, his school education didn’t suffer: “I got two Bs and a C, which was good enough to get me into university, but, luckily, I never ended up going there,” he says.
Thanks to the success of Girl from Mars, Ash secured their debut appearance on iconic TV music show Top of the Pops.
“I sang live on it,” says Wheeler, whose fellow band members performed to a backing track. “There was quite a lot of pressure on me – especially as I kicked the song off. We tried to give a lot of energy, and it was good. I think it did well and it connected, the show was huge back then.”
Since it was released, Girl from Mars has had a permanent place in Ash’s live setlist – the band aren’t one of those acts who shy away from playing what’s arguably their most well-known song.
“We’ve got enough other big singles that it doesn’t feel too different from some of the other hits, but, over the years, it’s grown in a way even more than anything else we’ve ever done and it’s stood the test of time more” says Wheeler.
“I guess I’m very fond of it and it’s connected with a lot of people. We play it at every show, and it always goes down amazingly. As soon as you play it, you know it’s going to kick off. We normally play it second to last in the main set – it’s always a real sweet spot. Over the years, we used to play it earlier to kick things off, but it seems to work nicely towards the end – it’s a nice thing to build up to. When I play it now, I sometimes think back to those huge festival slots that we had at Reading and Glastonbury – it would always go off at those huge shows.”
This October, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of 1977, Ash are reissuing their debut album as a special 2LP or 2CD set, as well as a digital version. The new editions feature extra tracks, B-sides, live versions and rarities, including a new demo mix of Girl from Mars. From September, the band are embarking on a world tour, on which they’ll play the whole of 1977, as well as other songs from throughout their career.
So, international travel is on the cards for Wheeler over the next few months, but how does he feel about space travel these days? Would he like to go on a mission to Mars?
“I would find it quite terrifying now to be honest,” he says. “I like the Buck Rogers version [of space] where you’re walking around, and you don’t need any fancy headgear and all that. Last year, we did a video for [new song] Give Me Back My World, where we were in replica space suits and it was incredibly claustrophobic. I was like, ‘wow – this is so intense…’
“I’ve read a lot about the Apollo missions, and it seems like it must’ve been so terrifying. I do like hearing about how when you’re looking down at the world how small it can look and what perspective that can give you – that sounds amazing – but going to Mars is a whole other thing; an epic voyage. I’m not sure about it at this point in my life – I’ve got kids… I’m happier to stay on Earth, but it’s nice to look at the stars.”
