I know a girl called JonnyShe’s a bullet, she’s a villainessIn my silver dress, I’m the disasteress
Eddy Benz, an experimental artist out of New Orleans, has built his reputation the old-fashioned way: loud bars, crooked stages, and the sort of DIY disorder that leaves a room buzzing. His 2024 album Spectacle pushed that sensibility into the open; now Benz returns with a haunting lo-fi video for his cover of Rowland S. Howard’s (I Know) A Girl Called Jonny, and as with much of his work, the piece draws its strange electricity from cinema and literature.
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.
Directed by Matt Jones and produced by Benz with Louie Shades, the video carries a distinctly Lynchian air: uneasy, off-kilter, and slightly surreal, as though the camera itself has begun to question what it’s seeing. Spastic camera movements jerk across the frame, the images shot on an old DV camera and streaked with the grain of Super 8 film. Two cross-dressing performers take center stage with a sly theatrical presence, while Benz himself hangs back in the dim edge of the room playing bass, half-hidden, like the Great Oz himself.
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