I’ve seen better singers and musicians than Taylor Swift in my time, but she has something that blows other stars away
‘No dad-dancing, OK?’ instructed my 12-year-old daughter firmly as we arrived at Wembley Stadium on Sunday night.
Elise will tolerate many things from her father, but not, it turned out, me shaking off some frantic moves to Taylor Swift as Prince William did in front of his kids last Friday.
Nor was I allowed to wear ‘boring’ clothes.
Nor could we miss a single second of the entire six-hour extravaganza including terrific warm-up acts Benson Boone and Paramore, and extensive – and expensive! – time spent in the merchandise area.
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I’ve barely been to any concerts since I ran The Sun’s Bizarre column from 1989-1994 and attended so many gigs that I developed an allergy to them.
But when you have a young daughter then not attending a Taylor show isn’t an option, so I came out of retirement.
And I was genuinely curious to experience the biggest pop music phenomenon since peak Madonna and Michael Jackson, and possibly even peak Beatles.
I saw both Madge and Jacko at Wembley during my Bizarre days, and they were both sensational.
Could Taylor live up to them, or even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as the Fab Four?
She certainly does commercially.
Her 152-date Eras stadium tour will gross more than £1.5 billion from ticket sales alone by the time it ends in December.
Merch rakes her in another £1.5 million PER NIGHT, adding £228 million to the pot, and the movie of the show netted another £204 million, taking the overall revenue income to nearly £2 billion.
These are staggering statistics, dwarfing anything that any other musician has ever earned from a tour.
And that’s before we get into the massive global Taylor economy boost which has seen cities all over the world, including London, enjoy surging Swift-related spending from hotels, restaurants, taxis, shops, car rentals and sight-seeing.
So, Taylor Swift is indisputably big, humongous business.
And her record sales are just as sensational, with her latest album The Tortured Poets Department selling 2.6 million copies in its first week and becoming her eighth No1 album on the US Billboard chart in the past four years alone.
Added to which, one in every 78 songs streamed in America in 2023 was by Swift.
These, again, are insane numbers.
But is she worth it?
How good IS she?
The Eras tour is a perfect way to assess this, because it encompasses her whole 19-year career, like a Greatest Hits of each stage of her life, and she performs over 40 songs in for three-and-a-half hours.
My first impression as I entered Wembley was of the sheer palpable joy and excitement on everyone’s faces.
Most of the audience had come dressed to play (even I’d heeded Elise’s advice and donned my most colourful shirt), and the stadium was ablaze with glitter, cowboy hats, and the fabled friendship bracelets which Swifties have embraced on this tour to share their love for all things Taylor.
Wembley was buzzing and as an on-stage countdown clock suddenly appeared to denote the remaining seconds left to lift-off, 89,000 people went berserk.
Then she was here, exploding on stage like a silver-clad, white-booted, heat-seeking missile, and soon letting rip into one of her biggest ‘bangers’, Cruel Summer, as giant turrets of smoke erupted all around her.
Big stars don’t usually unleash their greatest guns so early into a show, but it was a genius move, like setting off a Catherine Wheel seconds into a fireworks display.
“Do you know how amazing YOU’RE making ME feel right now?’”Taylor exclaimed.
I looked at Elise and her friend, both singing and dancing with delirious joy.
And then I looked around to see everyone else doing the same.
“I have my ways of knowing what kind of crowd it is before I even walk out,” Taylor told us. “My dad burst into my dressing room earlier and said Tay, if night one was here (raises hand), night two was here (raises it higher), then night three is off the charts!”
True or not, she made us believe it.
The subliminal theme of the whole show was “We’re in this together” and she never stopped reminding her fans of that.
And therein lies the magic of Taylor Swift.
“Thanks to you, I am feeling immediately and extremely powerful,” she said, feeding off their energy as voraciously as they were feeding off hers.
The hits come thick and fast, from The Man and You Need To Calm Down to Midnight Rain and a barn-storming Shake It Off, and I was amazed how many I remembered.
It’s also remarkable to think that she wrote all of them herself.
Of course, they’re mostly about love, and romance, and heartbreak, and pain.
And her fans know they’re based on Taylor’s own relationships, good, bad and ugly, which adds to the visceral support they feel for her.
There’s no denying her incredible talent; she sings, plays the guitar and piano, dances, acts, and switches dresses faster than a catwalk model.
And she talks you through her life.
I found the most poignant moment to be when she spoke about the pandemic, and how she feared we might never do this together again.
Ironically, given that Taylor sings a lot about suffering, she feels like a much-needed antidote to all the suffering everyone’s endured through the past few years of deadly viruses, wars, and cost-of-living crises.
The show is a spectacular flame-fuelled cavalcade of cheeky fun interlaced with very real, heartfelt honesty about love lost and won, life endured and enjoyed, hopes dashed and reborn.
But ultimately, it’s about being happy; how to find it, how to keep it, how to rescue it from the depths of despair.
And who doesn’t want a bit of happiness right now amid all the horror?
Towards the end, I looked down to see Sir Paul McCartney and his daughter Mary dancing with some Swifties to ‘But Daddy, I Love Him.’
Everyone, including the ex-Beatle, looked so happy.
Just as Prince William did when he dad-danced like a whirling dervish to Shake It Off in the most joyful moment anyone has seen him display since his wife and father both got diagnosed with cancer.
To emphasise just how happy she herself now is, Taylor even wheeled out her boyfriend, NFL superstar Travis Kelce, in top hat and tails for a funny skit as she sang I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.
As he carried her in his burly arms, to tumultuous roars from the crowd, Taylor’s message was to her ex-loves was clear: “I’ve had the last laugh, suckers.”
In my Bizarre days, I saw better live singers (Freddie Mercury), better dancers (Jacko), and better all-round musicians (Prince), but I’ve never seen anyone with a stronger connection to her audience than Taylor Swift.
As for her songs, they’re the purest form of pop music, each one telling its own little story, each one touching the heartstrings in its own little way.
She writes great pop because she understands what people go through in the relentless emotional rollercoaster of life, having experienced it herself.
The last time I came to Wembley was three years ago for the Euros final, when 10,000 drunken yobs broke in without tickets to cause mayhem, England lost its biggest match for 57 years, and I caught covid.
Suffice it to say, this was a more pleasurable experience.
I didn’t need to ask Elise if she’d enjoyed herself.
Her beatific face said it all.
The only dampener for me came as we left, and stewards handed us all a free friendship bracelet.
Everyone else in our group got uplifting loving messages.
Mine said simply: “Y U gotta be so mean?”
There’s no hiding place from Taylor Swift.