Taylor Swift had finished the European leg of her Eras Tour with a record-breaking show at Wembley Stadium that was packed full of surprises.
The pop star was joined on stage by Florence + The Machine and by Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff, rewarded fans with the premiere of a new music video and gave the first live rendition of her song So Long, London.
It was Swift’s eighth concert at Wembley this summer – overtaking a record for any solo singer, which was set by Michael Jackson with his Bad Tour in 1988.
“You just made me the first solo artist to ever play Wembley eight times in a single tour,” she told fans. “We will never, ever be able to thank you enough for it.”
The star’s eighth Wembley show also saw her equal the overall record for the most nights at the venue on a single tour, set by Take That on their Progress Tour in 2011.
‘This is the best’
The star’s headline-dominating tour has criss-crossed Europe all summer; with the Wembley finale marking the 131st date of her two-year trek.
In the UK alone, she played to almost 1.2 million people, generating an estimated £1bn for the country’s economy.
A team of geophysicists in Edinburgh even recorded seismic waves generated by fans dancing at Murrayfield Stadium, which made the ground move by a maximum of 23.4 nanometres (nm) during the song Ready For It?
The London dates marked a high point, with Swift playing there more times than any other city on her itinerary.
“I’ve always loved playing for you here in London, but this is the best,” she said during Tuesday’s finale.
“I’ve never had it this good before. I’ve never had a crowd that’s so generous.
“You seem to have memorised every single lyric of every single song, and that’s a dream come true.”
She made the final show count, bringing out Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine to duet on the song Florida!!!
The British singer’s appearance triggered a wave of screams, as the two stars stood face-to-face, bellowing the chorus at each other at the end of a catwalk.
But any dedicated Swiftie knows that the real highlight of the Eras Tour is the acoustic set, where she plays two “surprise songs” that aren’t a regular part of the setlist.
Last week, the star was joined by Ed Sheeran to play the songs Endgame and Thinking Out Loud.
For the last date at Wembley, she was assisted by Jack Antonoff – one of her core collaborators on Grammy-winning albums like Folklore and Midnights.
Together, they played a guitar-based medley of Death By A Thousand Cuts and Getaway Car.
To fans’ delight, the pair even staged a goofy reenactment of the Getaway Car recording session, where they wrote the song’s bridge in a 30-second burst of inspiration.
So Long, London played for the first time
Swift then continued the acoustic set at her piano, with the live debut of So Long, London, from her latest album The Tortured Poets Department.
Fans had been speculating for days about whether she would perform the track, which is widely believed to be about the end of her relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn last year.
The couple were believed to have lived in Primrose Hill during the pandemic, and Swift had written an earlier song, London Boy, in his honour.
But the six-year relationship fell apart last year, a month after Swift launched the Eras Tour in North America.
On So Long, London, she sings about the death of a London-based affair: “You left me at the house by the Heath… And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”
But the surprises didn’t end with the acoustic set.
After the three-and-a-half-hour show ended and Swift had left the stage, she played a brand new music video on the stadium’s big screens as fans started to make their way home.
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Featuring brand new behind-the-scenes footage, it gave a glimpse into the massive scale of the Eras tour, with Swift travelling under the stage on train tracks and rehearsing the audacious “stage dive” that’s become a highlight of the concert.
The video was soundtracked by I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, a highlight of her recent album, which details how the opening leg of her tour was overshadowed by the emotional fallout of her break-up with Alwyn.
“All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘More’,” she sings in the pre-chorus.
However, there has been an altogether more tragic backdrop to this summer’s shows.
On 29 July, three young girls were killed in a horrifying attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport.
A few weeks later, the star had to cancel three dates in Vienna after security forces foiled a potential attack on her fans at the Ernst Happel Stadium.
Swift is understood to have personally reached out to the victims of the Southport stabbing, and released a statement saying she was “at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families”.
However, she has not referenced either incident on stage – preferring instead to focus on the sense of community that has become the defining characteristic of the Eras tour, where fans swap friendship bracelets and make new friendships every night.
The tour has even spawned a side-industry of spreadsheets, cataloguing every costume variation and surprise song that’s been played along the way.
The countours of the show are so familiar to dedicated Swifties that they now join in with her scripted stage patter (“Welcome to the Eras Tour!”) as often as her song lyrics.
It adds a certain element of camp to the proceedings – like a sanitised pop remix of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
On stage at Wembley, Swift lapped up the adulation, saying it was “a privilege to do the thing I love, in front of any size crowd at all”.
At an earlier show in Liverpool, she had also called the Eras Tour the “most exhausting, all-encompassing but most joyful, most rewarding, most wonderful thing that has ever happened in my life”.
The 34-year-old will now take a well-deserved break, before firing up the tour for one last jaunt across the US and Canada in the autumn.
When it reaches its final date in Vancouver this December, it will have made an estimated $2bn in ticket sales alone.
Without question, that will make it the biggest tour of all time – with revenues more than doubling Elton John’s farewell tour, which was the previous record holder.
The big question is: What will Swift do then?
By BBC
