Photography: Barry C. Douglas
Melbourne Cricket Ground, February 16, 2024
"My songs are autobiographical," Taylor Swift tells the audience at the first of her seven sold-out Australian shows. As with anything Swift says while at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 96,000 people scream their appreciation back at her. "Dear Diary" songs, as she also calls them, are typically the domain of a writer lacking in imagination or curiosity, but in the case of Swift, self-reflection is a superpower. Attention is lavished on feelings and incidents with an intoxicating sense of validation. As anyone who has visited Melbourne or Sydney recently can attest, swarms of bedazzled fans in sequins, glitter, cowboy boots, hats, capes, flowing dresses and pastel bodysuits have responded to this validation with collectivist glee.
The Eras tour showcases music Swift has made over the last 18 years: from her time as an aspiring teenage country pop singer to world-conquering cultural juggernaut. Each of her ten albums is an "era", defined by its own colour scheme, costuming, choreography and staging. Hours before showtime, thousands of people thronged the grounds around the MCG, trading homemade wristbands. This tradition dates back to late 2022 when Swift sang “So, make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it,” and has resulted in a national shortage of beads.
You have likely read similar trivia and statistics that have excitedly contextualised the arrival of Eras, the most lucrative tour of all time. Tonight’s crowd is the biggest of her career. Evidence of her impact on local and national economies is well documented. Outside the stadium, merchandise stalls are replete with price tags that have scant regard for the cost of living crisis, yet she could (by one metric) have sold out the MCG 40 times over.
“18 years of music, one era at a time. How does that sound to you, Melbourne?” Swift asks, to a response that sounds like 40 MCGs. “My name is Taylor; I’ll be your host for tonight.”
Beginning with the pastel tones of her 2019 Lover album and its songs Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince and Cruel Summer, Swift’s voice – a soprano that finds its depth and strength through layering rather than range or ornamentation – is always in service of the story she is telling. Her uncomplicated yet deceptively well produced music also works to support her narrative worlds. Lighting effects, props, video art and a boutique’s worth of costumes are employed to explicate the themes of the show’s 45 songs. Video screens cover the catwalk and stage, their imagery pushing our attention back toward Swift or dazzling us with world building as costume and set changes take place at a breathtaking speed. In one particularly striking moment that closes her 1989 era, Swift "dives" into the catwalk, appears to swim its length and emerges at the rear of the stage in a different outfit to climb a ladder into a cloud that floats upward. Searchlights strafe the skies above us to let the heavens know just how sure she is that We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. Confetti blasts from white lights like a snowstorm for the cold facts of All Too Well. Flames leap skyward around the stadium to let Bad Blood. Swift's Karma comes with a pyrotechnic display that evokes Sydney on New Year's Eve. Eras is a spectacle that matches the intensity of the emotions around it.
There are also moments of sublime calm and near silence. For her arboreal evermore era, Swift performs in a green velvet cloak followed by dancers with orange orbs. The stadium in reverential silence, awaiting her appearance and letting mellow guitar arpeggios fade into the vacuum over our heads. folklore, an album she wrote while "a lonely millennial woman at home watching TV, drinking white wine and covered in cat hair," takes place in an imagined forest cabin, brought to life on stage. Many songs are separated by keenly told personal reflections and stories and, like the lyrics, these are also known almost word for word by the crowd. Sitting at a moss-covered piano for her ballad Champagne Problems (about the refusal of a marriage proposal) she is – at least momentarily – caught off guard by our response to the performance. "You guys!" she mouths, her eyes bright with tears. "Oh my God." While it is hard to be sure, this moment feels very genuine. Several minutes pass before she tells us, “I really do love coming to Australia.”
Authenticity is difficult to verify in a show as carefully staged as this, but analysing whether something Swift expresses is true is an impossible task, particularly when it is overwhelmed by the integrity of the response it engenders. That she recycles the same chords, rhythm and tempo from Champagne Problems for her ten-minute epic All Too Well and that they are the same chords, rhythm and tempo as U2's With or Without You is similarly beside the point. The sheer force of personality and the way it becomes part of the openness and accessibility of her songs is what makes the greatest impact. When Swift sings "fuck the patriarchy" and tens of thousands of young women and girls scream along with her, is this the passing of a torch or a sign that those words are now an empty touchstone? Either way it is, like so much of tonight, another cause for collective euphoria.
It is this response that often missing from assessments of Swift’s songs and her concerts. Joy is rarely regarded as a serious product of art, particularly when expressed by young women, and it takes a Herculean effort to remain unmoved when Swift approaches my section of the crowd. Girls, many bedecked with wristbands and glitter, scream, weep and clutch each other, overwhelmed at the reality-warping significance of her presence. Particularly during the 1989 era, when Swift celebrates her discovery of maximalist pop with songs like Shake it Off, Style and Blank Space that parents, first aid staff and security guards can’t help themselves from filming.
Three months ago, Swift was named TIME Magazine's Person of the Year. "She became the main character of the world," wrote Sam Lansky. Not only because she is one of the most successful businesswomen in history and with a cultural power that has presidents craving her favour, but she is a storyteller who has built a career validating womanhood.
Much like her best songs are loaded with specificities (a forgotten scarf, a saltbox house, cheer captains and bleachers) their enactment is full of details that tie them to their era and to the events that inspired them. It's both a way into these very personal songs, and a narrative world carefully constructed to feel closer to her, even on this gargantuan scale.
In her book Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children, Jane Gilmore describes Swift as a woman who "wrapped herself in the princess daydream and subverted it into the patriarchy's worst nightmare: an intelligent, ambitious woman who rejects marriage and has the power to choose the success of her own creativity as her happy ever after." Tonight, we saw autobiography rewritten as romance. As Swift sings in her final era, Midnights, “I guess sometimes we all get just what we wanted.”
Posted by Andy Hazel