She arrives, of course, as if by magic. As dancers dressed with giant flower petal costumes move around the stage, like extras from Rio Carnival, she appears without warning, popping up from a trapdoor in the centre of a walkway stretching deep into the audience. She is beamed onto a giant screen that covers the length of the stage, her expression suggesting she’s seemingly been caught by surprise – what are you lot doing here? – before she bursts out smiling and the roar of the crowd gets even louder.
You join us on the penultimate European date of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, a trek which began last March in Glendale and concludes in December in Vancouver. The Eras Tour comes trailing its own set of eye-watering statistics – from global pre-sales to attendance figures and box office receipts – accompanied by an unbroken cycle of clickbait news stories, from the price hikes of hotel rooms near the venues to the grilled chicken handed out by Swift’s father to hungry fans and the value of freebie tickets reportedly gifted to Keir Starmer.
The tragedy of the Southport murders and the Vienna bomb plot, meanwhile, may have unavoidably amplified the mood of this last leg of the European tour, but none of it diminishes the show itself. The atmosphere here is, if not exactly one of outright defiance, then certainly filled with hope, as if the charming loyalty and optimism of the Swifties – all smiles, sparkles and friendship bracelets – has created an aura of goodwill and positivity along the Olympic Way and into Wembley Stadium itself. Even the rain is enterprisingly co-opted into the show: “I think when it rains for more than six minutes, we can officially declare it a rain show!”
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It would be hard to dent the Eras Tour spectacle. This is as well-drilled as a Broadway show – at one point, Swift talks collectively about her stage entourage that includes musicians and dancers as “performers” – and full of visual tropes referencing everything from musicals to fairy tales. The tour set-list that covers each of her 10 studio albums one at a time, feels like the ATP classic album treatment – Iggy and the Stooges play Raw Power in full! – but on a massive scale. The Red era – the colour scheme recalls another Nashville incomer, though with more sparkles than The White Stripes – gives way to the leather and beats of Reputation and on through the Stanley Donwood-meets-Marvel Comics decorations of Folklore/Evermore, the cheerleader pop of 1989 and the cold, MC Escher-like structures of The Tortured Poets Department. These are not presented sequentially, so while the narrative of Swift’s artistic development is fragmented, what does emerge is the consistency of her work – from the dubby, Clash/MIA basslines of “You Need To Come Down” to the ‘70s singer-songwriter qualities of “All Too Well”, the minor-chord melancholia of “Champagne Problems” and the sleek synth pop of “Fortnight”. At the core of all these different Taylors, though, is song craft and she’s never better than when solo with guitar or at her piano.
What we learn about Swift herself from all this is a different matter. The autobiographical nature of her songwriting – in essence: “I can handle my shit” from “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” – is empowering but relies mostly on shared experiences rather than drilling deep into specifics. The Tortured Poets Department may be a roman-a-cléf about Swift’s own romantic disruptions – “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith, this ain’t the Chelsea hotel” – but it works best as a generalised meditation on discontent, vengeance and wisdom. But here are other clues, on display. Earlier on in the day, during Paramore’s support slot, Hayley Williams spoke about how they got their chops together in Swift’s basement in Nashville. A great chunk of Swift’s set takes place with her leading her band with an acoustic guitar, a throwback to her hopeful, early slots at the Bluebird Café What the Eras Tour unquestionably, but discretely, underlines is her drive and determination – to overcome early Music Row rejection and push on, honing her craft and ultimately ending up here, adeptly shapeshifting from Tinker Bell to Elsa and beyond in front of 92,000 people. “My name is Taylor, thank you for travelling with us at the Eras Tour.”