Over five decades, I have been lucky enough to witness some of the great rock concerts of our time. Bob Dylan at Blackbushe in the late 1970s, The Everly Brothers Reunion Concert at the Albert Hall in the early 1980s, The Rolling Stones at New York’s Shea Stadium in the 1990s and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Paris a few years after that.
If that sounds overheated and inappropriately ecstatic I refuse to apologise
There are many others but those are the first to light up my memory bank. Now add Taylor Swift’s Eras concerts at Wembley stadium to that list. Three nights last weekend and another five nights to come in August, this is one of the great events in modern popular music. The sheer theatrical grandeur, the dramatic staging, the superb music and dance performances and, most of all, the emotional buy-in of 88,000 people, almost entirely women, in a stadium that pulsated with light and sound for three and a half hours, made it a sensational night.
If that sounds overheated and inappropriately ecstatic I refuse to apologise. As I discovered this weekend my euphoria over Taylor (Taylormania?) has now been shared by friends, colleagues and relatives, few of whom started out as devotees. So, it isn’t just me. We all went to Wembley and we all became Swifties.
As a frequent visitor to Nashville and someone who has had a life-long affection for country music, I have been well aware of how Taylor Swift is revered and respected in equal measure across the music industry. It is well known that she persuaded her stockbroker father to move the Swift family there from Pennsylvania when she was 14. And while her musical roots are in Nashville – by 16 she was working with some of the city’s major songwriters and has since won armloads of country music awards – she has long since transcended country music. But they still proudly claim her as one of their own.
So, I had been bothering my younger daughter to get tickets for this concert for months and a few weeks ago she announced she’d come up with the goods. Although she is just 30 we broadly share musical tastes and it was at her behest I had downloaded Folklore and Evermore, Swift’s two 2020 albums. I have to say I was underwhelmed. Quite pleasant song structures, but not particularly profound songs, and her voice seemed agreeable without being in the same league as say Emmylou Harris. My Bob Dylan-worshipping daughter concurred but said there was more to Taylor than these two albums. Way more. It was a movement, she declared.
Then I read Julie Burchill’s brilliant recent assessment of Taylor and the penny dropped. As far as her songs go, Swift is more a writer than a pop star, a chronicler of the suffering young women have had to endure at the hands of callous men. Even the title of her latest album – The Tortured Poets Department – offers evidence of this. While Jagger, Springsteen and other male rock stars sing to their audiences, Taylor sings with them, and as I discovered at Wembley, they with her. Her forte, according to Burchill, ‘is toying with discarded men like a particularly sleek and self-assured cat.’
When I arrived at my daughter’s flat to pick her up for the concert she presented me with a Taylor letter-bead friendship bracelet she’d made: ‘Graham luvs Taylor.’ I was soon to discover that this was a modest acceptance of tribal identity as most of the Wembley attendees had such bracelets running up their arms. There was a fierce trade in bracelets all along Wembley Way.
Inside the stadium we found ourselves surrounded by women of all ages, from pre-teens to pensioners, and just a smattering of men, presumably there either as dedicated dads or designated drivers. Below us was a group of young Muslim women in hijabs and bright, spangly flowing dresses. To our right a group in glittering cowgirl costumes with one wearing a white ball gown that had Taylor’s song lyrics written neatly all over it. And to our left a pair of women who were almost my age, both with Taylor friendship bracelets stacked up on their forearms almost from wrist to elbow.
Taylor’s dramatic entrance, surrounded by swarms of dancers against a backdrop of eye-watering pyrotechnics, was greeted by the loudest ovation I’ve ever heard at Wembley, a crescendo of adulation that harked back to Beatlemania. Then for the next three and a half hours she and her large troupe of dancers, musicians and actors performed more than 40 songs, intricate Broadway dance routines interspersed with special effects, confetti explosions and waves of changing colours across the grandstands courtesy of the glowing wrist bands that had been issued to everyone on arrival. And this audience would sing every single word of every song for the entire concert.
In the middle of all the razzle dazzle, there were two moments that suggested to me that Taylor Swift is not only a gifted performer but also a human being with a beating heart, a rare quality in a global superstar. There was a short acoustic segment she called her ‘surprise section’ which featured her on her own, accompanying herself on guitar and piano. Two of the songs, ‘Death by A Thousand Cuts’ and ‘The Black Dog’ (a pub in Vauxhall), referenced her heartbreak over her failed London romances. The passion with which the 88,000 sang along with her suggested an emotional bond that went far beyond the relationship between entertainer and audience.
A little earlier this audience had erupted in a spontaneous wave of cheering and clapping that built to a mighty crescendo. It took place in between numbers, and was apropos nothing more than their sheer delight at being with this woman they clearly adore. Much as she has obviously become used to mass adoration, Taylor seemed genuinely moved by this. She may even have shed a tear.
The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde, who was also there with her daughter, summed it up perfectly in an email she sent me at the end of the night. ‘It is beyond extraordinary,’ she wrote, ‘that a billionaire – a woman who is the main character of the world, who clearly has no meaningful peer group and is living this irreplicable life – is nonetheless, for all these people, the most relatable woman on the planet.’ Quite so.
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