Enter the Swiftverse: A Night at the London Leg of the Eras Tour
I am old enough to remember the last time you could possibly call Taylor Swift niche. I was in my first year of university, and she had just released “Red”, the 2012 album that edged her from country to pop. She was already one of the world’s biggest stars, but fans still felt a responsibility to spread the word. You could tell your classmate about her, and explain how she’s a little like Stevie Nicks, a lot like Joni Mitchell but her own thing entirely: specific and universal, funny and heartbroken, and a fondness for self-analysis that might make Freud blush.
We are beyond this now, and probably beyond perspective too. When the singer touched down in London this summer for the first leg of the Eras tour (UK Version), the city’s mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled a redrawn Tube map, in which stations were renamed with Swift’s songs. Spare a thought for Hammersmith which became “I Forgot That You Existed”. In late June, I set off from “I Think He Knows”, changed at Baker Street (that vanished on the redrawn map: shake it off, Sherlock!) and headed to Wembley Stadium, which had been replaced by a red heart. I could not work out the reasoning for much of the map’s design but then again mass hysteria isn’t usually a breeding ground for logic.
Mass hysteria, it turns out, is a breeding ground for cowboy hats and leather boots, for slogan T-shirts and sequinned skirts, for flowing white dresses and cheerleader two-pieces. All references to Swift’s 11 albums, countless music videos, her three different hairstyles. If one mark of a pop star’s success is how often their image is reproduced (and customised and personalised to your own experiences), you did not need to enter the stadium to find evidence of the 34-year-old’s immense success. Gold dresses for Fearless or long coats for Evermore or neon sunglasses for 1989. It is all there, on Olympic Way: Swift’s evolution from country singer to the biggest pop star in the world.
Swift understands the power of her image, possibly more so than any other contemporary pop star, and has split up the three-hour concert into these eras. They are reassuringly familiar: gleaming 1989 with “Shake it Off” (that one from wedding dance floors) and “Blank Space” (her finest pop moment), yeehawing Fearless with “You Belong With Me” (her most tightly-engineered song) and “Love Story” (her defining moment). Lover kicks things the entire thing off with the irrepressible “Cruel Summer”.
The Folklore/Evermore set is pretty and pretty long: its highlight, “Champagne Problems” (a Richard Yates short story in the form of a break-up song), earns a minutes-long standing ovation. The finale, a stamping ode to the Eighties-riffing Midnights, feels and looks triumphant. She marches around to album highlight “Anti-Hero”, then pulls out “Vigilante Shit” (complete with chair-dance routine), and the firework-filled closer “Karma”. And for the ten minutes that Swift plays her breakup anthem “All Too Well”, 90,000 people in northwest London perform heartbreak.
On the opening night in June, Swift named London “the most exhilarating city in the world”. Presumably, she is not referring to Hammersmith. But I sense that Wembley, pop music’s Mecca, is where she is at home: with a view to the open sky, treading boards strutted by Prince, Freddie Mercury and her Imperial Pop forebears. At one point, Swift announced: “London, you really are the winners, aren’t you?” It was so convincing that I wondered if our city had adopted a new slogan. I googled it on the way home: not yet, but there’s still time for Khan to announce one before the tour wraps up later this month.
It is easy to forget among all the above that Swift is not actually for everyone. That while over 600,000 people will see her in London this year, she remains principally the domain of women, largely Gen Z and millennials. My friend and I appeared to be the only men there together without an accompanying girlfriend or daughter. Certainly we were the only ones drinking pints of cider.
Not that this mattered. Many words have been spilled on Swift’s fans, who are called the Swifties and are known for, among other things, intense devotion to the Pennsylvania-born star as well as uncovering the “Easter eggs” she inserts into songs, music videos and Instagram posts. It’s boring to discuss their online pursuits – slightly crazy sure, but whose aren’t? In person, though: buoyant, welcoming.
We swapped friendship bracelets with a pair of Miamians who had flown in for the weekend just so that they could witness the set for The Tortured Poets Department, the wickedly funny album Swift released in April. During “Blank Space”, I asked our new friends for a photo and the Swifties assembled, Avengers-like, in a circle around us. One of them handed me her drink, explaining as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, that I could use it as a prop. “It has a really cute straw,” she assured me. I looked down at her gift, as Swift sang about soured love and had to admit that the straw (lilac, stripey) was, a little like everything else at this euphoric experience, really cute.
Cute and euphoric: that is where Swift now operates, and for the better. Any cynicism I had about the surrounding 14-year-olds – what they could possibly know about heartbreak? – slipped away by the second song. Because Swift, the premier songwriter of her generation, is a point of reference, for your past or potential. Her music is tumultuous – punctuated with heartbreak, first dates, kissing the wrong person, finding the right one – and her best gift is the suggestion that with any luck, your life can be too.
The Eras tour resumes on 15 August at Wembley across five nights
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