If familiarity breeds contempt, then Taylor Swift should be getting roundly scorned. Unfamiliarity with the pop hegemon has become a near impossible condition as she traverses the globe with her record-breaking Eras tour. Since it began in March 2023, she has released three hit albums, had 27 songs chart in the US top 20 and released the highest grossing tour film ever. Totting up the hours of listening and watching, I have probably spent more time in her company than with some of my closest friends.
To this can now be added the three hours and 20 minutes of her Eras show at Murrayfield stadium in Edinburgh. The first of three nights at the venue, it marked the arrival of the tour on British shores. Loch Tay in the Scottish Highlands had been renamed Loch Tay Tay for the occasion. In Edinburgh city centre, glitter and Taylor-themed apparel were ubiquitous: gold minidresses, cowboy boots and hats, glittery leotards — audacious outfitting for a fresh Scottish summer evening.
An immense caravan of tweens plus parental chaperones, teenage girls and young women headed towards the near 73,000-capacity stadium. (Some of the menfolk wore American football tops bearing the name of Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs.) Most of the Swifties present would have already seen the show — not in the flesh, but on screen. The concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (worldwide box office gross $261mn) came out in the middle of the Eras tour itself (projected ticket revenue, more than $2bn).
This gave the event an odd kind of familiarity. It risked breeding not contempt but a nagging feeling of surfeit. So while the singer’s entrance was spectacular, hey-prestoed from within a cocoon of fabric on a runway stage to ear-busting acclaim, her opening sequence of songs had a slightly perfunctory feel. Opening number “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” was truncated: it deserved more. The burlesque revue for “The Man” — Taylor as corporate alpha in bright pinstripe jacket with dancers dressed as office workers — was fun but throwaway. However, any hint of staleness vanished as the momentum picked up.
Epic in length, with more than 40 songs and a vast amount of stagecraft, the tour is spectacularly ambitious. Its setlist is broken into “eras”, each representing a different album from her discography. At Murrayfield, a huge screen for visuals on the main stage was flanked on either side by backing musicians. A long runway extended towards a thrust stage over halfway down the pitch. Swift, alone or accompanied by back-up singers and dancers, used the space very adroitly, mixing up the movement and viewing angles. Costume changes were done quickly, sometimes on stage from beneath a canopy of feathers or umbrellas held by her dancers.
She knew where the cameras for the big screen were, ending songs by spinning on her heels to fix the lens with a meaningful stare. Yet she was also attentive to the different areas of her large audience. A solo acoustic-guitar version of “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” was interrupted when she spotted a stricken audience member. During the same song, her guitar-picking hand was frozen into a claw by the evening chill, to her amused consternation. This was an unfamiliar occurrence: it had never happened to her before.
The setlist also had a degree of unfamiliarity, rejigged to incorporate her latest album The Tortured Poets Department. Its literary theme has inspired a striking new costume: Taylor in an elaborately cut white dress with copperplate writing on it, like a sartorial volume of poetry. During the gothic-pop of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, she stood on a mobile box that moved across the stage via an unseen force, forcing dancers to recoil as she pointed at them in the manner of a Marvel superhero. Dance number “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” was set to old-school Busby Berkeley routines with tailcoats and canes.
Amid all this choreography, Swift’s appealingly flowing singing style continued without pause. (Her breath control is an under-appreciated skill.) Each word was sung back at her by the tens of thousands in the stadium. Their familiarity with the songs, and also the gestures that the singer made while singing them, was opposite to contempt. It made the atmosphere electric, a shared peak with the world’s biggest pop star.