Written By Chris Norris
Sometimes metal isn’t escapism. Sometimes it’s the thing that makes you feel alive when life has become brutally small.
The Scepter Tim Berry Hospital Concert Comes Together
For 27-year-old metal fan Tim Berry, attending a concert wasn’t possible. Berry was receiving care at Bruyère Health in Ottawa and was medically unable to leave the facility. After receiving difficult news about his health, he told clinical chaplain Roshene Lawson that there was something he deeply wanted to experience: a heavy metal show.
So Lawson decided that if Tim couldn’t go to the concert, the concert could damn well come to Tim.
What followed turned an ordinary room inside Bruyère Health into something considerably louder.
Lawson reached out to Ottawa’s Dominion Tavern, whose owner, Scott McClinton, had the equipment, connections and willingness to help make the idea real. Ottawa metal band The Scepter came aboard, and suddenly this wasn’t going to be someone quietly strumming a guitar beside a hospital bed.
They were going to give Tim a metal show.
No Watered-Down Version
The Scepter brought the machinery with them: amps, lighting, instruments and enough volume to make the room feel like an actual venue. Fans were even positioned to send the band’s hair flying while they played.
A conference room became the unlikely venue, chosen so the band could perform properly without subjecting every other patient in the facility to an involuntary metal festival.
The band ripped through a roughly 40-minute set while Tim watched from his hospital bed, joined by other patients and members of the Bruyère staff.
And the hospital staff didn’t treat it like another activity on the calendar.
Nurses painted Tim’s nails for the occasion and got him into a metal shirt. Lawson created actual concert tickets. People presented them at the door, had them torn on entry and came inside for the show.
For those 40 minutes, the room wasn’t defined by IV lines, call bells or medical equipment.
It was a venue.
“No, I’m Really Happy”
At one point during the performance, staff noticed tears running down Tim’s face.
Afterward, Lawson asked whether the volume had made him cry.
His answer was much simpler.
“No, I’m really happy.”
That’s the whole damn story right there.
The Scepter deliberately refused to treat the performance as some diminished imitation of a concert simply because it was happening inside a healthcare facility. Guitarist Josh Collins explained that the band wanted Tim to experience a genuine show rather than a watered-down hospital version of one.
That meant playing dressed for the stage, bringing the lights and amps, and performing with the same commitment they would have brought to a conventional venue.
The photographs tell the rest. There is Tim in his bed with the band roaring away only feet from him. In another, he’s holding a flyer while the musicians perform directly in front of him.
This wasn’t somebody wheeling a Bluetooth speaker into his room and calling it a concert.
They brought the fucking concert.
More Than Noise
There’s something particularly fitting about heavy metal being the music at the center of this story.
Hospitals are filled with sound, but very little of it belongs to the patient. Machines hum. Alarms chirp. Wheels scrape across floors. People enter rooms and discuss medications, numbers and procedures. Eventually the soundtrack of being sick can swallow everything else.
For Tim, this was different.
This was noise he chose.
Lawson described the experience of being able to let that kind of sound wash over someone as cathartic, particularly in an environment where patients have limited opportunities to release fear, anger or frustration.
And everyone seems to have walked away from the show carrying something.
McClinton said seeing Tim’s smile and watching the reaction of the hospital staff was something he would remember for the rest of his life.
For The Scepter, the connection isn’t ending with the final note either.
The band says its next album will be dedicated to Tim Berry, a way of carrying him forward into whatever comes next.
Metal spends a lot of time singing about death.
Every once in a while, it gets the chance to remind somebody they’re still alive.
And on that day in Ottawa, that’s exactly what it did.
Band Line-Up:
JP Abboud – vocals
Josh Collins – guitars
Morgan Walsh – guitars,
Stew Everitt – bass
John Crawford – drums
The Scepters debut full-length, Shadows in the Tower, is out now via No Remorse Records,
Track Listing:
1. Riding Out
2. Where Art Thou
3. Protector of the Skies
4. Drink On
5. Burn Bundy Burn
6. Dunes
7. Taarakian Blood
8. Shadows in the Tower
9. Bonus Track
Follow The Scepter Online
About the Author
Chris Norris is the voice behind Metal Lair’s global metal coverage, World Metal Weekly. From funeral doom in the north to thrash born in the streets. Known for spotlighting bands before algorithms notice them and for writing with the precision of a scalpel… or a well-sharpened guitar pick. Vinyl collector. Night-shift journalist. Believes heavy music has no borders.
Read More From This Author:
World Metal Weekly India Edition
Green Carnation Part III: The Messiah Complex Interview
Interview With The Ghoulstars: Horror Punk, VHS Culture & The Dark Overlords of the Universe
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