“Who is Luke Biscan?”

‘And he asked him, What is thy name?
And he answered, saying,
My name is Legion: for we are many’

- Mark 5;9

My name is Luke. The son of lead guitarist and founding member of 80’s Aussie rock band ‘Goanna,’ turned preacher man.

I’ve had music and scripture in my blood since I was a kid. Growing up, it was the King James Bible, old school Wesleyan hymns, Led Zeppelin and Hendrix. Dad left Goanna in the early 80’s to join ‘The Geelong Revival Centre’ (a Holy Ghost pentecostal church.) Three years later he flew to England with my family as a foreign missionary. I was born in the city of Bristol in 1988.

Dad bought me a ‘Seagull’ parlour guitar for my seventh birthday and My fingertips developed calluses almost overnight. I wasn’t a prodigy or anything like that but I sure did love playing guitar. I had a couple of lessons from a guy with a mullet that looked like Stephen king. He taught me a couple of Clapton riffs and a few blues staples. I overheard him once talking to my dad in the hallway as I was putting on my shoes. He said - “your boy …. I think he’s got something…”. Could it be that I was someone “who had something”? I sure hoped so. Most nights me and dad would stay up late watching music doco’s or surf movies. But not Wednesdays or Sundays. We had “the meetings” on those nights.

I began writing songs in my early teens. I wrote them in a note pad titled ‘Luke Biscan’s Song book.’ In thick black permanent marker ink. Those songs were unlistenable and rip-off’s of songs from bands I’m too embarrassed to mention. But I did have a song book with my name on it and that had to mean something? Jackson Browne wrote his breakout hit ’These days’ in 1967 when he was sixteen. My dad always used to talk about how amazing it was that a musician so young could have the life experience to write a song like that. It seems to me, good writing has as much to do with living as it does talent. And I was doing a very different kind of living in Bristol. The kind of living that didn’t feel very much like my own life. I’d been sheltered from the world, there was no doubt about that. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing for me growing up. The world is the world after all. But in the words of Neil Young “Comes a time.”

My time came In July of 2012, when I touched down at Melbourne Airport with a guitar, a suitcase and a handful of original songs. A lot can happen in twelve years..

So - Who is Luke Biscan?

Simply put - Every iteration of myself I’ve had to become, to become who I am today. Songwriting is my life. And to write a song, a good one, you’ll need the help of everyone you’ve ever been.



‘And he asked him, What is thy name?
And he answered, saying,
My name is Legion: for we are many’
- Mark 5;19