Voltaire at the Vogue

Voltaire’s show Wednesday night was great, as I’d hoped.

xementio picked me up around 8pm, we drove down to Capitol Hill, found a place to park, and spent a few minutes wandering along Broadway. Since she’s new to town, I got to show her a bit more of Broadway and introduce her to some of the stores along the strip, though it was late enough in the evening that there wasn’t really much time for shopping.

We headed up towards the_vogue around nine, and the place was already full enough that we weren’t able to find a table. Oops! Silly me, thinking that the “doors open at 9pm” bit on the flyer meant that the doors wouldn’t open until 9pm. ;) Still, no biggie, we just found a spot on the floor to say hi to people (I saw Ellen and…gak…her husband, whose name I will remember someday, back by the bar; we chatted with Tricia for a while; and I saw anzu for a moment before losing her in the crowd), wait and watch people dance.

And wait. And wait.

The one downside to the evening was that while everybody (including the staff at the Vogue, apparently) was expecting the show to start between 10 and 10:30pm, Voltaire got caught up in selling CDs, comics, other sundries, and talking to people, and didn’t actually take the stage until about 11:15pm.

Still, once he made it onto the stage, the show was well worth the wait.

He used the same low-key setup as he did last year, no backing band, just him and a guitar. As with last year, one of his first songs was a tongue-in-cheek cover of Rammstein’s “Du Haßt Mich”, and then on to other songs. Lots of fun between-song banter and storytelling also.

Songs I remember from the playlist: The Vampire Club, Ex-Lover’s Lover, When You’re Evil, Goodnight Demonslayer, plus one from a New Wave style band that he’s getting started with called One Semester Lesbian, Fully Functional from his Star Trek tribute/parody album, and a hilariously raunchy (to the point of being obscene) country-style ballad set in the cantina on Tatooine from Star Wars.

In addition to the photos I took over the course of the night, I also took a few minutes of video a few times during the night, and have put together a nine-minute sampler of bits and pieces of the show. Linked to the right is a low-resolution version (QT .mov, 9Mb), here’s a high-rez version (QT .mov, 37.5Mb) for those who have the bandwidth. Be warned — not everything in the video is exactly “family friendly”, though it is quite funny.

The show ended a little after 12:15, and as Danielle had had to bail out a bit earlier, I booked down the hill into downtown to catch a bus home. While I missed the 12:20am bus, there was one last run at 1:20am, so after kicking back with this weeks Stranger and Seattle Weekly for a while, I finally made it home and crawled into bed about 1:45am.

So, a long night, but a lot of fun, and worth the late bedtime.