The song Benz has chosen comes with its own curious pedigree. (I Know) A Girl Called Jonny was written by Howard in the mid-to-late 1990s while he was assembling the material that would become his first solo album, 1999’s Teenage Snuff Film. Howard had already carved out a formidable reputation through his work with The Birthday Party and later These Immortal Souls, but the years leading up to Teenage Snuff Film saw him step back from the band carousel long enough to shape a collection of songs that felt intensely personal.
(I Know) A Girl Called Jonny fits neatly into that record’s gallery of decadent figures and doomed attachments. Both Benz’s and Howard’s version unfold at a deliberate pace, guided by a tremolo guitar and a restrained rhythm section that leaves plenty of room for a worn, romantic voice. The proverbial Jonny drifts through the lyrics like a rumour whispered across a bar counter, surrounded by desire, addiction, and the faint scent of self-destruction. Howard’s fondness for decadent literature and bleak blues fatalism hangs over the piece, lending it the atmosphere of a noir vignette unfolding somewhere between romance and ruin.
Benz approaches the song with a kind of crooked reverence. Through the warped lo-fi lens of his video: grainy images, strange gestures, and a parade of performers who seem to have wandered in from another dream, Howard’s doomed heroine finds herself recast inside a different midnight theatre, Jonny still roaming the edges of the story while the lights stutter and the camera keeps rolling.