Taylor Swift Eras tour: Edinburgh show worth six stars and akin to a secular religious mass ritual

Two and a half hours into the epic opening night of the long-awaited UK leg of her world-beating, record-breaking, billion-dollar-making Eras tour, Taylor Swift swooned to the ground, as if emotionally and physically drained by performing twisted anthem The Smallest Man in the World, the bitter centrepiece of her latest chart-topping album, The Tortured Poets Department.

Two of her entourage picked the superstar up and went through a circus clown routine of changing her costume and shaking her awake in time for the next song, a Hollywood musical-style romp through the defiantly upbeat I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, staged with blazing panache. The show must go on! And on! And on!

Over a year into a world tour featuring 46 songs, representing all 11 original albums diarising and mythologising the 34-year-old singer-songwriter’s complicated love life across her 18-year career, no one could dispute that Taylor Swift can do it with a broken heart.

At this point, she can probably do it in her sleep. A roaring, singing, shrieking 73,000 strong audience at the first of three shows at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh affirmed that she can do it better than anyone else in the world right now.

Nevertheless, an open air stadium gig in Scotland presented its own unique challenges, like performing the never more appropriately named Cruel Summer with an icy wind whipping through her skimpy one piece. I could imagine my late Scottish grandmother looking Swift’s succession of negligible outfits over disapprovingly before muttering with concern: “Ye’ll catch yer death, hen.”

Indeed, in one of the few truly spontaneous moments in a tightly-drilled production, one of Swift’s hands cramped from the cold, forcing her to halt a solo acoustic guitar rendition of Tis the Damn Season. “This is so weird and embarrassing,” she declared, massaging her fingers back to life.

But actually the way she took it in her stride, chatting jokily then picking up the song again for a long singalong coda, was almost a perfect demonstration of the absolute force of Swift’s persona. Yes, she can do it with a broken heart. And yes, she can do it on her own, with a frozen hand on a bitterly cold night in a foreign land and still make it look like she’s having the time of her life.

All stadium shows contend with problems of scale, dealing with how to keep humanity at the centre when performers are just tiny dots in the midst of huge crowds, and all eyes are on big screens and special effects. Swift’s Eras manages to combine heart and spectacle, in large part because Swift is astonishingly good at every aspect of the music business, as adept at marketing as songwriting, tying her brand together with the skills of a world class performer.

In her live element, she offers Bruce Springsteen levels of charisma and stamina and does it all in high heels, albeit her graceful physical movements really boil down to a lot of choreographed sashaying about amidst swirling dancers.

Musically, Swift is an accomplished guitarist and pianist who slips in and out of her slick six-piece band arrangements but she drops the keys of many songs to spare her vocal cords stretching too far for top notes, an old pro trick that nonetheless means she often sings lower than what might be considered her most naturally pliant range.

But it is hard to even notice because she has four backing singers and a stadium full of devoted fans to sing every word with her, so her voice is effectively at the fore of a humungous Swiftian choir.

Personally, I don’t think there is much in music more impressive than a mass singalong, and Swift’s clever, heartfelt, emotional and melodious songs lend themselves to it. The intensity in the faces of her audience as they mirror her lyrics as if articulating the stories of their own lives is profoundly impressive and even moving to witness.

During a passionate 10-minute version of her intense ballad of male callousness All Too Well, I watched two young women singing every word with tears streaming down their faces. Swift means everything to Swifties, and to be at a Swift show is akin to being immersed in a community of song, one of the closest things we can get to a secular religious mass ritual in the modern age.

The flow of the concert is better than when it opened in Arizona in March last year. I gave five stars to that performance, so perhaps I should be giving six stars to this version, because everything that was great about Eras is still great, but Swift has reordered the acts to rise and fall with more nuance and power.

Nipping and cutting six songs made room for a batch from her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, staged in black and white as dystopian science fiction, complete with a spooky visitation from a UFO.  In particular, the sequence of the bravura yet still innocent songcraft of the Fearless era (circa 2008) developing into the bright modernity of Red (2012) then whiplashing into the digital dark pop drama of Reputation (2017) makes so much more narrative and musical sense.

The whole crowd roared “She’s DEAD!” at the conclusion of a provocatively teasing Look What You Made Me Do, before Swift was artistically reborn in the more subtle shades and staging of a compressed Folklore / Evermore era (both albums released in 2020).

There were no special guests, and little straying from a by-now familiar script. But no one could feel short-changed by a set that really had it all, succeeding in what might seem on paper to be an impossible synthesis of serious singer songwriter and full on commercial pop machine.

Swift left it all onstage, standing sweaty and exhausted at the end, with a smile that somehow extended beyond her permanent air of artificial delight to shine with unalloyed joy. And tomorrow … she will do it all again.