Contrary to popular belief, Ash's 1995 single Girl From Mars is a song about Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space. Sharman completed he PhD while working as a chemist at confectionery, maker Mars Limited in Slough. She was known to her friends and enemies as "the girl from Mars", so when she had a falling out with Ash's lead singer Tim Wheeler(only 16 at the time!) over a Bakelite telephone at a car-boot sale, it was only natural for Ash to record Girl From Mars.
Far from helping the situation, Girl From Mars made things ten times worse! Ash had just sat their A-Level exams, should have been concentrating on getting university places through the system known as Clearing, not stirring up trouble with a cheeky little ditty about the UK's first astronaut.(the first to return alive, that is)
Somehow NASA came to hear of the single and immediately started using it as their hold music. This was clearly an attempt by NASA to anger Sharman, who had stayed at Soviet space station Mir in 1991, upsetting the American space agency so much that they wote something rude about her on the surface of the moon.(it's still there to this day)
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