Taylor Swift is good at surprises. During the pandemic, just a few months after releasing her Grammy-winning album Folklore, she released a follow-up, Evermore. This year, just a few hours after releasing The Tortured Poets Department she came back with a 31-track version called The Anthology. In her June Eras tour dates in Wembley Stadium she brought Paramore’s Hayley Williams and even her new boyfriend, Travis Kelce, onto the stage.
And this week, on the first night of her final five London dates, taking place against the backdrop of the cancellation of all her Vienna gigs due to a terror threat, she duetted with Ed Sheeran during the surprise songs section of her concert. Both picked up acoustic guitars for Everything Has Changed and End Game, two tracks they collaborated on for Swift’s albums Red and Reputation, before switching into Sheeran’s classic Thinking Out Loud.
“This is one of my best friends in the world to the point where I feel like he’s a second brother of mine,” Swift said as they stood arm in arm, she in a blue ballgown, Sheeran in his trademark plaid shirt, white T-shirt and dark jeans. “We toured together on the Red tour [in 2012]. Every time I am doing the Red part of this show, I think about the memories that we’ve made. And now he is someone who plays Wembley, like, every week. This is, like, regular for him. And he works so hard and he’s on tour right now and he’s probably so tired. But he wanted to come and play for you and do this for all of us.”
There are plenty of Sheeran sceptics, me included. But there’s no denying the communal yelps all 92,000 of us let out while watching this. It came towards the end of another exhilarating set that has barely changed from when I saw her at Wembley in June.
She still covers all her eras from Fearless to The Tortured Poets Department (although not her debut, which purists may have an issue with). She still sits on her little moss cabin for the Folklore section and stops to listen to the deafening ten-minute applause when she finishes playing Champagne Problems on the piano.
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And it’s still a mammoth affair: three and a half hours of nonstop songs, although with no official warning she came on earlier than her previous 7.25pm start time, kicking off just after 6.40pm with Lover, which meant those of us coming after work had to sprint to get there. Is that too long for a gig? Some would argue yes. I don’t have an issue with it: Swift has a repertoire filled with bangers. But I’d argue she could do fewer songs and not cut short her best ones such as Style, Wildest Dreams and Down Bad.
Her between-music chat also hasn’t changed much. The Eras tour is a well-oiled machine, delivering the greatest (or most successful) hits from each album in a set routine with no encores. This could make it seem impersonal. For a billionaire, and given she is the most famous artist in the world at the moment, her staging doesn’t have the wow factor you’d expect. Yet the faces around me seemed enraptured. People are paying mega money for this (for two women I met it was £800) and you can’t say she doesn’t deliver as a performer, making her crowd deliriously happy and emotional. She’s not trying to be cool. Instead, her lyrics make us feel as if she can relate to all our most cringe moments, even if she lives in a different world to us.
What other surprises lie ahead in her last hours in London? It’s a symbolic week as she says goodbye to a city she spent so much time in with her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn. One of the best songs on her newest album is called So Long, London, with its echoing vocals ringing out like mourning church bells.
Could she bring on Florence Welch for their new track Florida!!!? One Direction’s Zayn Malik for I Don’t Wanna Live Forever? Or will she join the brat summer and get Charli XCX on stage? Something exciting is bound to happen. I’m jealous of those who will get to see it. But I guess we can always catch up on TikTok.
★★★★☆
Taylor Swift is at Wembley Stadium, August 16, 17, 19 and 20, taylorswift.com; Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film is available to stream on Disney+
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