by Kerry Loyson

Don’t let Whitley’s mask fool you. Beneath his seemingly tender, sentimental and delicate visage lies Lawrence Greenwood, a witty Australian footy-loving larrikin who has been known to plunge into drunken, profanity-saturated experiences, musical support slots involving him sporting a Mexican wrestling mask and openly confronting raucously rowdy and boisterous audience members.

“I’ve just got no time for people who talk at my shows so I told her to fuck off!” Whitley expresses, clarifying the repercussions for an abruptly loud-mouthed American woman at a Boston show. “You pay to see the show and people are playing for 40 minutes and if you can’t sit there and watch a performance for 40 minutes you’re just really ignorant – you probably can’t even read a book! I just think it’s incredibly rude. But having said that I’ve done my fair share of drunken gig-talking and I’m alright on Friday and Saturday nights – I can handle it – because I know that people just want to get drunk and have fun. That’s fine. But if it’s a show and there’s a vibe going on and somebody is fucking it up by talking you’ve got to hammer them. And it’s so fun to do it! They just look so shocked! She looked like she was going to cry a little bit and then she turned around and tried to walk through the crowd.”

Exhibiting his playful, larrikin characteristics when informed that many of his potential fans could be accidentally visiting <myspace.com/whitley> instead of <myspace.com/whitleymusic> which unwittingly transports you to a seductively positioned 19-year-old girl from Alabama, who admits she’s prone to a brawl and hand-cuffed related activities, Whitley chuckles.

“Oh man, that sounds like my type! Let’s go to Alabama right now! There’s this dirty 19-year-old! Oh that’s hot! That’s definitely marriage material. Oh well, that’s alright! People will be like, ‘Whitley is way better looking than I thought and he likes handcuffs!’.”

Unexpected for the ostensibly sensitive folk lad from Victoria, right? Whiltley clarifies such a masked dichotomy.

“My personality is very strange to the extent where I feel like I have very different sides to me. Sometimes I can be on the ball and speak correctly and sound like I’m well educated and then other times I’m a drunken bogan, swearing and blowing things up. It’s stupid, it’s very stupid! I think the balance in the extremes makes me find my centre point.”

Having recently returned from the “Land Of The Free” where the specified “hammering” took place, Whitley dabbles in his American experiences and identifies the culture shock associated with such international touring.

“It’s going good. There’s been some really good shows and people have been turning up and stuff happening. I kind of saw America as this impenetrable barrier but when we got over here, it’s just the same as anywhere else. People are responding to the gigs the same way they do at home – it’s no big mystery or anything like that. There’s cool stuff happening and I’m having fun.”

“I think it was an English guy who said, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Americans aren’t foreigners because they speak English!’. Just because they speak English, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a foreign country. You come over here and it’s a totally foreign place… There’s no room for irony. People are very literal over here with their humour – that’s in general. I just think that Australians sort of take the piss a bit – it doesn’t seem to happen over here so much!”

While the majority of our conversation (which is accompanied by the beautifully occasional pluck and strum of the guitar by Mr Greenwood) is founded on comical mirth, Whitley does delve into the difficulty associated with Australian touring.

“It’s hard to put the time into Adelaide because you’ve got to push through those first few times of going there and not having anybody at your shows, so it’s usually easier to just wait until people get onto it in another way like by radio or something like that and then you can just rock up and you don’t have to lose thousands and thousands of dollars by flying your band out there! That’s why we never tour Perth because it will cost me like nearly 10 grand just to get everybody over there and paid and chances are it wouldn’t be a huge selling event because we haven’t got a grass roots following over there. So people in Perth bitch that you don’t come and tour there and everything like that and it’s like, ‘Well you know what? If you had more of an active music culture, you’d have more bands playing there!’ It costs heaps! But having said that though, Brisbane is not like a massive town – it’s not like Sydney or Melbourne or anything, but they still are really passionate about music there so you know you can rock up and if you played there three or four times, you know you’ll get more and more people coming and it’ll work out as something that you can keep doing instead of like having to work three jobs just to get up there!”

He continues by complimenting our fine city.

“Adelaide was actually really cool for us because when we played with Josh Pyke at Her Majesty’s it was a really fun show and then we played with The Panics at Jive… Actually, we started having a lot of fun after that in Adelaide. We had a great time last time with The Panics! We had a really big party night and we had a lot of male bonding.”

And would he spill any juicy secrets from The Panics?

“They’re like our best friends so I reckon if I pull out any secrets, Jae  [Laffer, Panics frontman] would have me!”

Whitley plays Jive on Fri May 23. The Submarine is out now through Dew Process/UMA.