Lawrence Greenwood is Whitley. Whitley is a musician, and one who retired this very moniker back in 2010, celebrating the finale with a run of intimate shows in May of the same year.
He’s also a bit of a dark horse, having grown up listening to “prog-rock stuff, like Tool.” But if you’re willing to back the unexpected, then put your money on Whitley, because he’s a man and brand of music that endures.
Despite an impassioned return to the Australian (and indeed global) music scene, the relationship with his hometown, Melbourne, has seemingly been a fraught one. Greenwood was quoted in his year of retirement as saying that Melbourne “actually pisses me off more so than anywhere.”
But now, in the midst of a John Farnham-esque The Last Time return, and with an album and tour about to be launched, Greenwood has amended this statement. He now says it was “a poorly written piece that focused on one thing I said, and in a joking kind of fashion. I love Melbourne – Melbourne’s great!”
But it’s not a city entirely free of flaws according to Greenwood, who is happy to admit that he has been frustrated with the music scene.
“I think just a little more sense of community,” he says. “I think that’s lacking at times. As well as the competitiveness of it, it can undermine it at times…
“I guess the main thing is that Melbourne comes out with great music and great bands, and it needs to be cared for because a lot of scenes will get really healthy and really vibrant, hold a lot of diversity, and then certain things will happen and they disappear. And I’d hate to see that happen here.” “I’d been travelling around just recording demos on my phone… with this little guitaralele.”
At the moment he is happier than ever to be back in Melbourne following many, often treacherous, months overseas, which in a fitting irony fuelled the stories found on his third album, Even The Stars Are A Mess.
Greenwood started on the Caribbean sipping mojitos before moving to London in the pursuit of a quiet, well-located studio. Some unfortunate events made this unfeasible, and as a result he scurried to The Netherlands to play with Melbourne band Kins in a friend’s apartment.
However, his arrival was met only with disappointment as the apartment’s air vent made a “relentless whistle,” making recording again an impossibility.
Then it was off to Peru, a country that had always appealed to Greenwood, and seemed like a “frontier in terms of recording a pop album.” But to continue the calamity, the singer-songwriter was struck down with salmonella poisoning and sent promptly back to London to recover.
Despite what seems like enough material for a TV sitcom, little recording had taken place by the time he arrived back in the UK. “I’d been travelling around just recording demos on my phone,” says Greenwood, revealing the extent of the process at the time.
However, there was a silver lining: “I found this thing called a guitaralele that Yamaha make … it’s a small guitar, with different tuning, which turns out to be the same tuning as a baritone electric guitar, they’re an octave apart.
“I was able to travel around with this little guitaralele and when I got back to London, I tried them on my baritone, and that’s the electric guitar you can hear on the album,” Greenwood explains.
But in spite of the many affronts he encountered, finally the Tuscany times arrived. The calm, wine-laden, disease-free, warm Tuscany times, which brought together the scattered elements of Even The Stars Are A Mess.
Greenwood took respite in a small village called Benabbio, inviting Whitley member Colin Leadbetter to join him, because, “Colin is the sort of guy who I can trust completely. He knows me very well. He is very talented and gifted musically and as an engineer. I knew I could trust him with my shit.”
Greenwood met Leadbetter when he was a mere 12 years old, as his parents owned a music store. “He sold me my first guitar!” Greenwood adds proudly.
This also seems a timely moment to introduce Leadbetter’s partner, Esther Holt, who features on the album’s first single, “My Heart Is Not A Machine,” as well as scattering her delicate vocals on a number of other tracks on the forthcoming album.
Of Holt’s contribution, Greenwood says that her vocals were added when he and Leadbetter returned to Australia. The album, and the single in particular, were apparently in need of “an injection of the feminine.”
So when looking back on his truly wild ride and asked if a single moment stands out as influential or defining to the new record, Greenwood simply says, “I think it’s the whole journey. I mean, that time in Tuscany was pretty special, but everything had been written on this big journey,” he elaborates.
“Basically, when Colin came along, we hung out, and ate magic mushrooms and walked in the forest, and generally backslapped each other and said we were fucking awesome!”
This unleashes tales of psychedelic mushrooms, homegrown and transported across half of Europe; of long lazy days and walks in the Tuscan forest, so high, according to Greenwood, that Leadbetter “suddenly decided that trees were actually really violent,” and that “they’re just on a different time scale.”“…we hung out, and ate magic mushrooms and walked in the forest, and generally backslapped each other and said we were fucking awesome!”
After such “bad thoughts invaded the trip,” they were understandably hesitant to launch into such ventures again. It was only when a friend revealed that they had been mis-weighing their fungus that they could rest easy and pay tribute to the exploit in a song.
“We’d been weighing it out at like five or six times the dose of what you’re supposed to take, it was even higher then what Terence McKenna refers to as a heroic dose! … That’s when it clicked – we’d just totally fucked it up.”
And just who is Terence McKenna you might ask? He was an American psychonaut; a free-thinker and heavy user of psychedelics and hallucinogenic who wrote and lectured on issues such as shamanism and the origins of human consciousness.
He’s also the man credited in the new album’s opener, “The Ballad Of Terrence McKenna.” But, Greenwood importantly adds, “that song was written before the heroic dose. I don’t know if I would have been capable of writing a note saying I was going to the shops after that,” he laughs.
But whatever it was – the psilocybin, travel or time spent alone – there is a loaded bucket of profundity in the title Even The Stars Are A Mess. Greenwood endorses this too, saying it’s a title that comes from “three different angles.”
The first, and apparently “most obvious” meaning, is that it’s a Werner Herzog quote, taken from the 1982 film Burden of Dreams.
“I can’t remember the exact quote but it’s about being disgusted by the jungle, that it’s riddled with fornication and collective murder and then concluded by saying that even the stars were a mess,” says Greenwood, attempting hurriedly to recall the film.
The second meaning is its inherent paradox; the idea that a beautiful star-scape is messy and error filled, and one that, “really hit home,” for Greenwood, with its “acceptance of disaster.”
Completing the trifecta of meanings is a personal anecdote, with one of Greenwood’s friends claiming, “It was funny because he’s under the impression that I’m a star and my life is a mess.”
Having covered a lot of ground, in a final bout of simplicity, Greenwood shares his anticipation about the forthcoming appearance at Byron Bay’s Splendour In The Grass.
“I’m looking forward to it immensely,” he says in a tone that conveys his boyish smile. “I love having that kind of PA under my control.”
Whitley 2013 Australian Tour
With Esther Holt
Tickets on sale 9am now
Fri 12th July: Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane
Oztix: 1300 762 545, www.oztix.com.au
Sat 13th July: Jive Bar, Adelaide
Moshtix: 1300 GET TIX (438 849); www.moshtix.com.au
Thurs 18th July: Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
Moshtix: 1300 GET TIX (438 849); www.moshtix.com.au
Fri 19th July: The Hi Fi, Melbourne
www.hifi.com.au / 1300 THE HIFI (1300 843 443) or Oztix: 1300 762 545, www.oztix.com.au
Fri 26th – Sun 28th July: Splendour In The Grass – SOLD OUT
