Just after eight o’clock on a hot August night, Taylor Swift takes to the stage at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
As she appears under the spotlight in her spangled bodysuit and glitter boots, a superstar dressed as a superheroine, the crowd of 70,000 goes wild, absolutely wild.
The noise they make is so overwhelming my eardrums pancake with pain while the humid summer air seems to vibrate under the sonic onslaught.
Neither the energy nor the excitement let up for the next three and a half hours. Swift plays guitar and piano, sings her heart out, dances down the long, catwalk stage in her custom Louboutin heels, and changes into one gorgeous, crystal-crusted outfit after another.
She delivers her hits with the stamina of an athlete and the charisma of a performer who is at the peak of her powers.
Whether in her cupcake wrapper couture ball gown to sing Enchanted or shimmering in gold fringes for Love Story, she is fearless, jubilant and almost as thrilled to be there as her adoring fans — known as the Swifties — with whom she has forged a unique bond.
This is ‘The Eras Tour’, a journey through Swift’s past, showcasing selected songs from each of her studio albums to date. From country ingenue to star-crossed lover, it is a parade of all the different Taylors she has ever been, which means all the Taylors that her fans have been, too.
For no one captures the whims, heartaches, dramas and tragedies of good love gone bad in quite the same way as 33-year-old Taylor Swift.
From underdog anthems to kiss-off bangers, she nails down the fragility, pain and joy of growing up like someone gently brushing flakes of gold leaf onto a bruise.
During the pandemic she released two albums, each featuring a new, stripped-back intimacy that connected her to her isolated fanbase in even deeper ways.
She is the queen of empathy, a woman who has managed to turn this emotional kinship into one of the biggest success stories in the business. Indeed, it is hard to grasp just how big this Eras tour has become; so massive that it has given a £3.1 billion bump to the American economy — with some even claiming that Swift has single-handedly stopped the U.S. from falling into recession.
This first North American leg of the tour found Swift and her band perform 53 sell-out shows in 20 different cities, starting in spring and smashing attendance records all the way.
By the time the Eras tour reaches the UK next June it will have boosted the global economy, made Swift a billionaire and broken nearly every pop statistic in the book: the fastest ticket sales, the greatest volume of tickets, the largest audiences, the biggest consumer spends, even the most demented demand for official merchandise.
Here in Los Angeles, the queues start forming at midnight outside the SoFi venue, even though the merchandise trucks don’t open until 10am. Swifties don’t mind a ten-hour wait, especially if they can get their hands on the coveted £60 blue crew-neck tour sweatshirt.
Why has this particular item become so special? Who knows, but like the gold- dust tickets to the live shows, you can find them being sold on secondary websites for ten times their value and beyond.
Everything about the Eras tour is extra; bigger, louder, better. By the time it wraps up in November 2024, Swift will have played 146 concerts across five continents, sometimes in earth shattering ways.
Last month in Seattle, scientists revealed the noise and fans dancing at the show generated seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake. However, the biggest impact created by Swift remains the fiscal one.
Fortune magazine’s financial analysts have called the singer’s economic effect the ‘TSwift Lift’, while The Wall Street Journal prefers ‘Taylornomics’, for the superior spending habits of the Swifties.
Swift’s two shows in Denver contributed £110 million to Colorado’s GDP while in her home state of Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh-area official tourism agency reported that Swifties spent £35 million on hotels, restaurants, retail, transportation and attractions during her two-night stint there.
In Cincinnati, downtown hotels took £2 million while tourism boss Julie Calver of Visit Cincy told ABC News: ‘Taylor Swift is a force to be reckoned with, the economic impact she creates is staggering.’
In Chicago in June, Swift played at Soldier Field to a combined audience of 190,000 and helped set a record for hotel occupancy in the city. Every night, thousands of fans who didn’t have tickets gathered outside the venue to sing along. (Beyoncé played the same venue the following month, but only sold out two nights to Taylor’s three.)
Chord by chord, song by song and city by city, Taylor Swift is building her Eras tour into an unstoppable force.
By the end of these six shows in Los Angeles, she will have played to half a million people here, bringing in an estimated £250 million boost to the city and attracting a slew of stars to her shows, including Kevin Costner, Emily Blunt, Laura Dern, Austin Butler, Emma Stone and even the Duchess of Sussex.
‘Now I get it,’ said rock star Paul Stanley from the band Kiss, who attended the fifth night in LA with his wife and daughters. ‘It is a phenomenal show by a phenomenal artist.’ Billy Joel was also full of praise. ‘She’s huge,’ he said. ‘You have to give her high marks. She knows music and she knows how to write.’ For the Swifties, he added, she was like ‘their generation’s Beatles’.
Certainly, there is an intense love-me-do moment half-way through, when the audience give Swift an eight-minute standing ovation following her rendition of Champagne Problems, a delicious, twisting sigh of a song about a troubled girlfriend turning down a marriage proposal. Eight minutes! You don’t even get that at the opera these days but this is Swift’s first tour for nearly five years and emotions are running high.
The Swifties have dressed up for the occasion, with many, many thousands of them decked out in fan favourite white cowboy boots, stylish glitter dresses, prom frills, sparkles and party bling. From my £150 seat high up in the nosebleeds of this gleaming new sports venue, I feel like a bat clinging to the lip of a volcanic crater, peering down into a boiling, joyous lava that bubbles with pink sequins and flashing concert wristbands.
The Swifties jingle their armfuls of friendship bracelets and are word perfect on every song; it is rare to come to such a large concert and experience such a friendly and inclusive vibe.
There are men here, yes, but in essence it feels like a coven gathering, one that is both aspirational and celebratory. It also feels like something more; like watching a dam being breached, history being made.
Do Swifties even need protecting? Listening to Swift’s songs has made them strong and fostered a devotion to their idol because the confessional elements of her music make them believe that they know her, or at least believe that her experiences mirror their own.
This is despite the fact that Swift is a now fabulously rich woman who owns not one but two Dassault Falcon private jets, recently bought the famous Goldwyn estate in Hollywood and has a property empire that includes her infamous Rhode Island beach house and lush properties in Manhattan.
None of this matters to Ehlana (22) and Tanja (21) who have flown down from Alaska — Swifties for 13 years. What was the secret of her appeal?
‘She helped us grow up, through break-ups and exams and family stuff,’ said Ehlana. Addie, a cool 16-year-old from LA believes that: ‘All girls can relate to Taylor, she is a genius. She came back from all that negativity and that inspires us.’
Certainly, it is no secret that Swift has had to live out some tough times in the public eye. There was the ghastly Kanye West saga, when he insulted her on stage at a televised awards ceremony.
And although they provide wonderful material for her songs, breaking up with high-profile boyfriends such as Harry Styles, Tom Hiddleston and more recently, Joe Alwyn, cannot be much fun.
And then of course there was her heartbreak split with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who stood her up on her 21st birthday, every bitter moment captured in her ten-minute masterpiece, All Too Well.
Enter Dan, who runs a wine shop in Los Angeles and is here with his wife and four daughters. He estimates he has spent ‘about a thousand dollars’ on tickets and treats for his family, but feels it is money well spent.
‘I’m so grateful for the influence Taylor has had on my daughters. Her songs have helped them grow up, helped them know how to deal with boys and with their self-confidence,’ he says.
I should add that he is wearing a slogan T-shirt that reads: Dads Against Jake Gyllenhaal. I spot others, including a DADDJG (Dads Against Daughters Dating Jake Gyllenhaal) and also DAKW (Dads Against Kanye West).
Of course, no Swiftie worth her sequins is going to allow herself to be defined by her father, but on this hot summer night, it feels right to celebrate a woman who stood up for herself when things went wrong, who is donating to foodbanks in every city she performs in and who just gave her tour workers about £50 million in bonuses.
Down, down, down on the stage far below, Taylor dances on and on in her glitter heels, the pop diamond who is a force of nature and a moral force for good.
