Curling up with some John Cage, WHITLEY is enjoying his last night at home and preparing for his upcoming tour by doing absolutely nothing. “I’m leaving it all to the last minute as usual,” he says. In fact he’s hardly practiced at all CAMILLA JONES discovers.

“The only time I play [the guitar] anymore is when I’m playing live. I’m interested in other instruments now,” Whitley tells me. I wonder out loud whether when a passion becomes ‘work’ it takes the shine off noodling in the nest? “I just like that world to exist on its own,” he replies. “To have its own little space. I don’t really like to play around the house anymore with guitars, I guess I’m mostly experimenting with other instruments and toying with textures and stuff like that – some weird stuff. A different angle, something new hopefully.”

I don’t imagine it’d be easy sticking exclusively to the acoustic, especially when you come from round Whitley’s way (Balnarring, Victoria) – Kisschasy are locals, Paul Dempsey lives down the road and Gotye’s a good mate. So is Whitley going to go all ‘Mixed Blood’ anytime soon? “No, I really disagree with sampling other musicians’ music. I love what Wally does, but I don’t personally think that sampling other people’s music is an honest art form. But that’s only my opinion, that’s only for my music. I think the way Wally does it is beautiful.”

At 22, Whitley’s full of opinions, which he says he learning to temper, along with picking up other lessons as he comes of age. “I guess you can never really be ready for that sort of thing,” he says of the attention he’s received since the release of his first EP – Lost In Time – last November. “I think I wasn’t prepared to deal with what the reality of the situation is, like how things are done in the music industry and how people are with each other,” he cryptically adds, “Politics too. Things like that getting in the way. I have a lot of opinions and I kind of have to hold my tongue on them, cause you’ll always offend someone if you have an opinion on something.” Does this mean Australian music’s most loveable scamp is he still feeling his way? “Definitely,” he admits. “There are things in the past six months that I’ve had to learn really quickly, coming from finding it hard to get a gig in my hometown to playing at sold out rooms – it’s been a very strange and quick transition. Whereas before I could be quite happy to sit at home and bitch at the tall poppies, I guess now, I’m going ‘uh oh, I might actually get my comeuppance on this one’,” he laughs.

The rocketing rise which will see Whitley tour Australia in the next few months, both headlining as well as supporting Josh Pyke, Mia Dyson and Holly Throsby, has also landed him gigs like this year’s Splendour, at which his golf buggy grand theft antics became a publicist’s dream. “I was just extraordinarily drunk I think,” he says of the infamous debacle. “I’d been looking at people driving round on them all day and I thought ‘I really wanna fucking do that’, so obviously it had worked its way into some evil Freudian subconscious desire. Then I got drunk and I was like, ‘Fuck this, I’m gonna drive one’. So I looked around until I found one with keys in it...” He trails off, not needing to elaborate on what happened next, an event which will go down in Splendour history, involving a crashed buggy, his accomplice Josh Pyke and one very angry security guard.

Whitley plays at the Valley Fiesta on Saturday Sep 15 and The Troubadour on Tuesday Sep 18. His debut album The Submarine is released September 15 through Dew Process/Universal.

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