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On a recent Friday night, amid the howling winds of an incoming hurricane, two people dressed as skeletons grinned as Chris Lahey screamed into a microphone.
“The sun fades to blackness, the moon to blood,” Lahey shrieks, fog hissing from a nearby smoke machine.
“Stars fall from a darkened sky!”
He was performing From a Cloudless Sky by thrash metal band Skeletonwitch. It’s not a track you’d find on offer at most other karaoke bars. But this is Heavy Metal Karaoke at Lucy’s Bar in downtown St. John’s.
The crowd is a tight-knit community of people who go there to “scream their guts out,” Lahey said.
It was Halloween, but co-organizer Susan Smith said regulars often dress up any time it’s held.
Smith and Vicki King started the event during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when bands couldn’t perform in front of audiences, but karaoke was allowed. They’d gather their friends, go to a bar and sing metal songs all night, Smith said.
It’s now an established monthly event, giving punks, metalheads and anybody else a place to throw up horns.
“It’s cathartic to get up on a stage and yell into a microphone in front of people you’re comfortable with,” Smith said.
“There’s a lot to scream about.”
Smith has long advocated for marginalized people and she works for a harm-reduction organization for people who use drugs.
Before Heavy Metal Karaoke, she was nervous speaking in front of a microphone. Now it’s no problem, she said.
She and King realized most people don’t have opportunities to get comfortable expressing themselves on stage. Heavy Metal Karaoke is always free, so more people can have that chance, she said.
On Halloween, there were about 40 adults of all ages in the bar. Some wore horns, coloured contact lenses or corpse paint — metal’s trademark black-painted eyes on ghost-white faces.
The music was intense, but the atmosphere was relaxed.
“If you consider Newfoundland as a whole, it’s a rough place to live. It’s a little darker, it’s a little bleaker than the rest of Canada,” Lahey said outside after his performance.
“I like to think that thrash metal, black metal, death metal, all of those things are in sync with the more difficult ways of life that people tend to encounter out here at the edge of the world.”
Dressed in black as a Sith lord from the Star Wars movie franchise, Mark Walsh said Heavy Metal Karaoke is “a great amalgamation of weirdos.”
“There’s a lot of talented people here,” Walsh said, waiting to sing a “Weird Al” Yankovic song.
A man dressed as a Pokemon villain sang Under the Weeping Moon by Opeth. Someone in a medieval knight costume thumped their weapon in time to a woman performing Black No. 1 by Type O Negative.
Metal is hard to sing well, said Rodney Wall, who has been a Heavy Metal Karaoke regular for several years. He likes to sing No Presents for Christmas by King Diamond, a Danish vocalist with a high range.
Wall practices before he performs, setting up a projector in his house and singing along to tracks on YouTube.
“I’ll scream my head off,” Wall said. “With all the little places [the vocals] go up and down, you can really find yourself lost.”
Lahey has put in “heavy-duty” hours of training to sing with black metal’s characteristic death-rattle rasp without hurting himself, he said. He has a one-man black metal project about Newfoundland and Labrador called The Ram Has Touched The Wall.
Heavy Metal Karaoke nights were instrumental in building his confidence and vocal skills, he said.
His advice to anyone curious about performing? Relax.
“Don’t be anxious,” he said. “Just get up there and yell.”
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