Graham Parker / The Mona Lisa's Sister / 1988
Get Started, Start a Fire
darkly comic, elegiac, unsettled
Graham Parker strings together three iconic women -- an invented sister to the Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, and Joan of Arc -- and binds them with a single image: fire as the endpoint of being consumed by other people's expectations. The chanted refrain works as both invocation and grim punchline, turning a rallying cry into something closer to a diagnosis of how fame and myth destroy women.
female suffering under myth and celebrity destruction as both punishment and release historical pastiche and anachronism irony of progress the body as spectacle
Who's speaking
An unnamed narrator observing from a wry historical distance, addressing the listener rather than any of the women directly; the voice is knowing, sardonic, not always sympathetic in tone even when the material is tragic.
What happens
The song moves through three vignettes in loose chronological reverse-order of fame: a fictional sister of a Renaissance icon rejected and erased, a modern film star found dead and mythologized into flame, and a medieval martyr transplanted into a contemporary, bureaucratic disaster. Each woman ends up associated with fire -- literal or metaphorical -- and each refrain treats "starting a fire" as an imperative, as if inviting the listener to repeat the pattern.
How it's built
Three verses of near-equal length, each telling a self-contained story, separated by an escalating refrain that repeats more times as the song progresses (two repetitions, then three, then four), giving the sense of the fire catching and spreading with each pass.
Section by section
Verse one
“Leonardo sent her home”
By inventing a sister who fails to become the famous portrait, Parker sets up a fable about being discarded by the very art or system that might have made you immortal. Her solitary, unfinished copy of herself becomes a stand-in for unresolved identity, and her intention to burn it foreshadows the album's controlling image.
First refrain
The chant lands as a strange kind of encouragement, ambiguous between destruction and creative spark, setting the tone for how the phrase will be reused with darkening implications.
Verse two
“cold when she was found”
The Monroe verse trades directly on tabloid mythology, but the narrator reframes her death as an ascension into a mythic register of heat and flame, almost defiantly. It's a move that risks aestheticizing tragedy, and the song seems aware of that tension rather than oblivious to it.
Verse three
“fingers taken off for smoking”
The Joan of Arc verse collapses historical martyrdom into modern absurdity, drawing a line between the arbitrary cruelty of medieval justice and the petty enforcement of contemporary rules. The joke about a nearby factory employing her killers adds an economic sting, implying oppression simply changes uniforms across centuries.
Final refrains
The repeated chant, now doubled in length, stops functioning as commentary and starts to feel like the song itself catching fire -- structurally mimicking the spreading, cumulative violence the lyrics describe.
Craft
- anachronism
- Joan of Arc is relocated to a modern airport security checkpoint, collapsing five centuries into one absurd image; the device forces a comparison between historical execution and contemporary petty cruelty.
- refrain as irony
- The chorus's imperative tone reads first as encouragement, then curdles into something more sinister as it's repeated after scenes of death, suggesting the command is less inspirational than fatalistic.
- extended metaphor of fire
- Fire shifts meaning across the verses -- destruction, sexual/spiritual heat, literal execution -- so that by the end it functions as a unifying symbol for how these women are used up or erased.
- invented mythology
- The nonexistent 'sister' to a famous painting's subject lets Parker build a parable from scratch, establishing the song's logic before applying it to real figures.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on how women become fuel for other people's stories -- artistic, romantic, religious, bureaucratic -- with fire as the mechanism by which they're both destroyed and turned into legend. A second, less flattering reading is possible: that Parker is using these women's deaths mainly as material for clever historical juxtaposition, with the political anger (the factory line) feeling almost bolted on. Both readings can coexist; the song's tone doesn't fully resolve which impulse wins.
Context
The Mona Lisa's Sister (1988) marked something of a critical rebound for Parker after a commercially uneven stretch in the 1980s. Beyond that general context, I don't have reliable details about the specific writing or recording circumstances of this song, so I'm reading it primarily from the text.
Listen for
- how the refrain's repetition count grows with each chorus, mirroring a fire spreading
- the tonal whiplash between tabloid tragedy and dry historical joke
- the way each verse ends on an image of heat or flame, tying disparate women into one symbol
- the deliberately anachronistic details planted in the Joan of Arc verse
About Graham Parker
Graham Thomas Parker is an English singer-songwriter, who is best known as the lead singer of the British band Graham Parker & the Rumour.
b. 1950 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue