Songfacts®:

• 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.
• "Girl From Mars" is a pop-punk anthem built around a fantasy romance that offered escape from a tense, isolated reality.
  
  "The girls in Northern Ireland weren't happening for me," Wheeler told Louder, "but you can really romanticize someone from outer space and put them on a pedestal."
• A self-confessed sci-fi obsessive, Wheeler grew up on Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, once even imagining his parents as Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. That fascination, along with his love of David Bowie and the Pixies' Trompe Le Monde - both packed with cosmic references - shaped the song's otherworldly frame.
  
  "Maybe it's to do with growing up in such an isolated place," he said of Downpatrick, a rough town 20 miles from Belfast. "The Troubles were still going on in 1993. It was an edgy place."
• Despite the title, Wheeler wasn't imagining a literal alien. "In my mind, the girl definitely wasn't green, she looked normal," he explained. "The people in Star Wars were just glamorous humans."
  
  The sci-fi angle became a metaphor, masking a very real heartbreak. Wheeler had just split from his first girlfriend and taken it hard. "I was still mourning that. At 16 I started getting depressed. I was a lovesick teenager." That emotional hangover gives the song its sense of yearning beneath the fizzy hooks.
• One of the lyrics came from a family holiday in France.
  
  Oh, we'd stay up late playing cards
  Henri Winterman cigars
  
  Wheeler remembered befriending English kids and staying up all night on the beach smoking cigars and drinking beer. "I wasn't trying to capture that coming-of-age spirit," he said. "It's just in there because that's exactly what was happening to me."