Review: Taylor Swift’s career-defining concert was pure pop magic
Saturday, 17 February 2024
REVIEW: Within the first 10 minutes of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Australia, the biggest concert of the star’s career to date, the concrete stands of the Melbourne Cricket Grounds shook with the power of tens of thousands of dancing feet.
With 96,000 Swifties in attendance, Friday night’s concert was the first of the star’s seven-show tour stop down under, and a masterclass in delivering pure pop perfection.
It’s one thing to get on stage and sing, and another to command a crowd for three hours across 44 songs with meticulous staging and choreography, without ever falling flat. With the Eras Tour, Swift has proven herself to be one of the most polished stage performers in the world.
The tour is as much of a cultural phenomenon as it is a concert: in the lead up, Melbourne’s city centre was pumping with sparkles, sequins, bright red lipstick, and oestrogen.
Days before the event, countless Swift T-shirts spotted the crowded streets, fans lined up early for merchandise, and her music could be heard in every other retailer.
Her shows will provide an economic boom to Australia, and everyone is trying to cash in; from market stalls trading knock-off merch and bars crafting Swift-themed cocktails, to tattoo parlours offering inked tributes to the star.
Wondering again why her tour snubbed NZ? There’s no way Aotearoa could have met the economic and social demands of the world’s biggest pop star and her history-making tour, already the biggest in humanity’s history.
It’s not quite her full eras of music, though. The concert omits hits from her debut self-titled album such as Our Song or Should’ve Said No, which would have added at least another 15 minutes to her already insanely long set.
But, the Eras Tour covers all - and I mean all - of the big hitters: from Fearless to Blank Space, I Knew You Were Trouble, 22, Cruel Summer, Shake It Off, and more bangers than I could reasonably list in one sentence.
Swift’s music, though consumed by millions (if not billions), feels achingly intimate in its lyrical honesty, yet easily digestible in its pop packaging.
There must be a reason why 4 million people fought an impossible ticket war just for the chance to see her - there’s something about Swift that makes you feel like she has zeroed in on your life, and is serenading these stories of love, loss, and happiness directly to your face, even in the nosebleeds.
Perhaps feeling a bit emotional by her career-defining concert, her boyfriend’s historic Super Bowl win (and a subsequent shooting which killed one), and never ending press, Swift told the crowd her upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, has been a lifeline for her in the last year.
“Songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life. I've never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it for this album,” she told the crowd.
In the acoustic set of the show, in which Swift adds two surprise songs to the concert, the singer opted for her 2012 hit Red, likely a nod to the colours of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Then, more magic, because it isn’t a historic Taylor Swift concert if she doesn’t make an announcement for fans: the singer unveiled an alternative album cover for TTPD and a new bonus track, and for the first time a performance of deep cut You’re Losing Me.
The pairing of the TTPD announcement and her second surprise song has already sent social media into a whirlwind of theories about her love life, the upcoming album’s sound, the stories she’ll tell and tea to be spilt. Nothing is ever by coincidence or without microscopic analysis in Swift world.
So why do we care so much about a billionaire pop star who is, in our physical reality, the most unattainable person in the world? There’s so many faces of Swift - the pop star performer, the artist, the NFL girlfriend, the heartbreak kid, the business mogul, the legal pariah, the PR circus, the A-Lister, the friend-to-all-celebrities, the philanthropist, the climate criminal.
As Olivia Rodrigo once put it: she’s “built like a mother, and a total machine”.
And yet, so many of us continue to come back to her, to keep playing the hits many consider over saturated by radio (and until recently, TikTok), to sell out three nights at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, to have already bankrupted yourself to watch her on Friday, then against all reason try to imagine a way to make it to the Saturday and Sunday shows.
One of the earliest Swift memories I have of my Swift dedication is of myself as an 8-year-old, endlessly listening to the Fearless ballad White Horse as though I had suffered the greatest heartbreak of all time.
Isn’t it a perfect coincidence that sitting in Yarra Park after the concert, trying to bring my brain back to Earth after experiencing the Eras Tour spectacle, a fellow Swiftie slipped a “white horse” friendship bracelet onto my wrist out of concern I was having a hard time?
That’s the power of Swift - for one night, magic, togetherness, fairy tales, and a hopeless romanticism of every day life can come true.