Taylor Swift Eras tour: The definitive review (2024)

Two and a half hours into the epic opening night of the long-awaited UK leg of her world-beating, record-breaking, billion dollar making Eras tour, Taylor Swift swooned to the ground, as if emotionally and physically drained by performing twisted anthem The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, the bitter centrepiece of her latest chart-topping album, The Tortured Poets Department.

Two of her entourage picked the apparently unconscious superstar up and went through a circus clown routine of changing her costume and shaking her awake in time for the next song, a Hollywood musical-style romp through the defiantly upbeat I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, staged with blazing panache. The show must go on! And on! And on!

Over a year into a world tour featuring 46 songs representing 10 original albums diarising and mythologising the 34-year-old singer-songwriter’s complicated love life across her 18-year career, no one could dispute that Taylor Swift can do it with a broken heart. At this point, she can probably do it in her sleep. A roaring, singing, shrieking 73,000 strong audience at the first of three shows at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh affirmed that she can do it better than anyone else in the world right now.

Nevertheless, an open air stadium gig in Scotland presented its own unique challenges, like performing the never more appropriately named Cruel Summer with an icy wind whipping through her skimpy one piece. I could imagine my late Scottish grandmother looking Swift’s succession of negligible outfits over disapprovingly before muttering with concern: “Ye’ll catch yer death, hen.”

Indeed, in one of the few truly spontaneous moments in a tightly drilled production, one of Swift’s hands cramped from the cold, forcing her to halt a solo acoustic guitar rendition of Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve. “It’s forming a claw. This is so weird and embarrassing,” she declared, massaging her fingers back to life.

But actually the way she took it in her stride, chatting jokily then picking up the song again for a long singalong coda, was almost a perfect demonstration of the absolute force of Swift’s persona. Yes, she can do it with a broken heart. And yes, she can do it on her own, with a frozen hand on a bitterly cold night in a foreign land and still make it look like she’s having the time of her life.

All stadium shows contend with problems of scale, dealing with how to keep humanity at the centre when performers are just tiny dots in the midst of huge crowds, and all eyes are on big screens and special effects. Swift’s Eras manages to combine heart and spectacle, in large part because Swift is astonishingly good at every aspect of the music business, as adept at marketing as songwriting, tying her brand together with the skills of a world-class performer.

In her live element, she offers Bruce Springsteen levels of charisma and stamina and does it all in high heels, albeit her graceful physical movements really boil down to a lot of choreographed sashaying about amidst gymnastically swirling dancers.

Musically, Swift is an accomplished guitarist and pianist who slips in and out of her slick 6-piece band arrangements but she’s certainly not averse to blending pre-recorded backing track elements into the mix. She drops the keys of many songs to spare her vocal cords stretching for top notes, an old pro trick that nonetheless means she sings lower than what might be considered her natural range.

But it is hard to even notice because she has four backing singers and a stadium full of devoted fans to sing every word with her, so her voice is effectively at the fore of a humungous Swiftian choir.

Personally, I don’t think there is much in music more impressive than a mass singalong, and Swift’s clever, heartfelt, emotional and melodious songs lend themselves to it. The intensity in the faces of her audience as they mirror her lyrics as if articulating the stories of their own lives is profoundly impressive and even moving to witness. During a passionate 10-minute version of her intense ballad of male callousness All Too Well, I watched two young women singing every word with tears streaming down their faces. Swift means everything to Swifties, and to be at a Swift show is akin to being immersed in a community of song, one of the closest things we can get to a secular religious mass ritual in the modern age.

The flow of the concert is better than when it opened in Arizona in March last year. I gave five stars to that performance, so perhaps I should be giving six stars to this version, because everything that was great about Eras is still great, but Swift has reordered the acts to rise and fall with more nuance and power, nipping and cutting six songs to make room for a batch from Tortured Poets. The Eras set is based on her discography, with each era essentially representing a particular album, albeit crucially not in chronological order, which would carry her from blousy country pop to the emotional wrecking ball of Tortured Poets and strand all her big mainstream hits in the middle.

She still opens with the Lover Era (from her 2019 album), from a moment when Swift was already on top of the world, and arguably a near-perfect synthesis of songcraft and pop hooks. Dressed in a spangly bodysuit (everything in Swift’s world flashes with glitter and tassels), she kicks off with a brief charge of Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince.

It is not one of her big songs, but it is a perfect thematic choice, signalling the narrative of the evening and, indeed, her career: a journey through the complex love life of a fresh-faced, pure-hearted, well-meaning American sweetheart’s dealings with a lot of apparently rather childish and troublesome men. Indeed, when she adorns a spangly big-shouldered jacket for snappily satirical feminist anthem The Man, comically encapsulating a sense of empowerment with the tart remark “you make me feel like man!,” she underlines the other major theme of the evening: sisterhood.

If you read the more hysterical commentary on her touchdown in the UK, Swift is in unprecedented territory as an all-conquering global pop phenomenon. All I can say to that is Elvis, the Beatles, Elton, ABBA, Michael, Madonna, Eminem, Adele… Seasoned pop fans have certainly been here before. It would be more accurate to say Swift is the latest thing, enjoying her imperial phase at a moment when her particular confluence of online and offline skills apparently penetrates all walks of life on Earth.

Yet her audience is overwhelmingly female, so while it may not exclude 50 per cent of the population (I certainly wasn’t a lone representative of my gender at Murrayfield), it clearly registers most potently with women, for whom Swift’s relentless advocacy of female perspectives in accessible pop songwriting is hugely empowering.

She has the skills to be a great entertainer in any circ*mstance for any audience, but right at this moment in time, I think she matters so much because she represents a kind of amplifier for the internal worlds of those too often (and for so long) shouted down in all public forums, pop music not least. Swift and her Swiftie legions are loud, and they are unapologetically proud.

You get a strong sense of this during the set’s strongest run, the conjunction of the bravura yet innocent songcraft of the Fearless era (circa 2008) into the bright modernity of Red (2012) switching into the dark pop drama of Reputation (2017).

Fearless is all gold and guitars, simple standard chord songs, the post-country pop that won her a major audience in America. It is almost as if the real narrative journey starts here (and worth noting too, that in her own career retrospective, Swift has completely eradicated her actual debut release, the slightly anodyne 2006 self-titled teenage country album Taylor Swift). You Belong With Me and Love Story deliver youthful romantic narratives that are easy to sing along to (and boy, as I keep saying, do this audience sing along!), played live with Swift on guitar and very much the leader of the band, her musicians trooping around on stage behind her.

The Red Era is staged in sharp, bright colours, and marks her global crossover, defining Swift as her generation’s finest pop chronicler of young women’s love lives, with the super smart and gossipy delights of We Are Never Getting Back Together, I Knew You Were Trouble and her outstanding account of her naïve youthful love affair with older actor Jake Gyllenhaal, All Too Well, delivered with an emotional edge that suggested she was reliving every torturous moment (as, indeed, were all the women around me).

As an addendum, we get a Disneyfied ballgown swish through Enchanted from Speak Now (her 2010 album), which is not so much represented as an Era as a last reminder of the innocence of those early years before skipping boldly ahead to the Reputation Era. There is a genuine sense of a switch in the narrative, involving the most striking staging of the night, the giant screens and long runway all transforming into a writhing snake as the imperial pop superstar version of Swift strides out in a superhero serpent suit.

This was her most deep bass, electro blasting, stridently superpop phase, as her heartsore narratives broadened to encompass the critics and trolls apparently so offended by her success. The stomping …Ready For It? is stridently exciting, albeit it proved something of a blind alley in Swift’s career that she has subsequently turned away from.

The whole crowd roared her snippy line “She’s DEAD!” at the conclusion of a provocatively teasing Look What You Made Me Do, presaging Swift’s artistic rebirth in the more subtle shades and staging of a compressed Folklore / Evermore Era (both albums released in 2020). These two understated pandemic albums really affirmed Swift’s serious status as a classic singer-songwriter to even the most sceptical audiences but prove the most challenging in a vast stadium environment, which perhaps makes sense of their reduction from last year’s setlist.

There is a quality of touchy-feely interlude as she sings from the roof and on the doorstep of a stage cottage in washes of acoustic Americana, the dark, witchy Kate Bush drama of My Tears Ricochet, Marjorie and Willow resonating strongly under darkening skies in Macbeth country.

Whether it is long, lyrical narratives from her most folky albums or sharply turned pop bangers from her smash hits, Swift’s audience sing every word, as if they have been studying the script for their big night. Nevertheless, the 1989 Era (from her global smash 2014 album) acts as a kind of premature climax, jam-packed with her biggest hits (Style, Blank Space, Shake It Off, Bad Blood) staged with sharp, clean edges, bright colours and eye-catching production gimmicks (dancers in boxes, a digital car being smashed up with glowing hockey sticks). It’s a belter, and two hours into any other stadium extravaganza, you might assume you had reached the moment when fireworks would erupt and we could all head home, but Swift is still building her own pop empire, with both of her most recent releases to come.

The Tortured Poets Era offers another dramatic change in tone, staged in black and white as dystopian science fiction, complete with a spooky visitation from a UFO during a moody Down Bad and Fortnight. She has otherwise plumped for the handful of storming anthems from the actually rather thoughtful and intricate 31-track double album, offering the throwback barnstorming country pop of But Daddy I Love Him, the dramatic super-witch spell of Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me, before the aforementioned supercharged reckoning of The Smallest Man and hammy showbiz revival of I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.

There were no special guests during her short acoustic set, no bagpipes or Scottish folk songs. This is a moment where Swift gets to play around a little with the set list and introduce some genuine spontaneity, but apart from the frozen hand incident there was little sense of straying far from the script that has served her for a year, and already been delivered almost line for line in a record-breaking cinematic concert documentary.

Still ending with seven songs from 2022’s slow-burning electropop Midnights Era might be considered counterintuitive, staged in noirish cyber purples as a friendly club night for Swift and her ever-smiling dancers. The songs effectively celebrate finding true love with actor Joe Alwyn, who is already two boyfriends in the past, whilst the emotional valediction of Karma offers a soothing coda rather than a truly explosive climax. It leaves the star basking in a state of grace that the subsequent release of Tortured Poets might call into question.

But no one could feel short-changed by a set that really had it all, succeeding in what might seem on paper to be an impossible synthesis of serious singer-songwriter and full-on commercial pop machine. Swift left it all onstage, standing sweaty and exhausted at the end, with a smile that somehow extended beyond her permanent air of artificial delight to shine with unalloyed joy. And tonight (and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow)… she will do it all again.

Related Topics

• Taylor Swift,
• Pop music,
• Behind the music,
• Edinburgh