The last time that someone with the surname Swift had such an impact on Dublin, they were writing about imaginary places like Lilliput and overseeing the shenanigans at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Three hundred years after Jonathan Swift’s work became enshrined in Irish culture, a young woman called Taylor Alison Swift made her own indelible mark on the capital over the weekend.
Make no mistake: whether you’re an ardent Swiftie or not, this was a show to remember. Just a week or two prior to the Eras Tour bandwagon rolling into town, Pink had wowed the Aviva Stadium with her jaw-dropping feats of aerial artistry. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, could’ve turned up with her diamond-encrusted guitar, sang a few songs and thrown a few shapes, and still a good 90% of the 50,000-strong crowd would have imploded in ecstasy.
Still, many of those rabid Swifties may have had their spirits (literally) dampened when they opened the curtains on Saturday morning and saw the dreary weather. While the rainfall receded throughout the day, the grey clouds remained oppressively low until thirty seconds before Swift took the stage. As a clock counted down the seconds until showtime, the clouds literally parted for the first time all day and blinding sunshine encased the stadium in light. Divine intervention, or Taylor Swift’s ability to control the weather? We wouldn’t dare make a case against either.
In any case, phoning it in was never on the cards. Now one of the most lucrative tours of all time, the Eras show encompasses superb choreography, spectacular moving platforms, multiple costume changes, fireworks, flames, neon bicycles, incredible AI visuals and even a folky cabin in the woods complete with smoking chimney. At one point, Swift ‘dives into’ the stage and appears to swim underneath the long catwalk that extends out into her adoring crowd. This is no ordinary stadium show.
As its title suggests, the Eras Tour is basically a showcase of everything that Swift can do; from her nascent country-pop era to her evolution as a pop superstar and her sidestep into folky introspection with the ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ albums. It’s the pop songs that pack the biggest punch here, though; while the sweet bounce of ‘Love Story’ provides an early highlight (and even a marriage proposal in the Lower East Stand), the real joy is found in the snappy, biting pop tunes: the goofy bounce of ‘We Are Never Getting Back Together’, the grimy, sultry sleaze of ‘... Ready for It?’, the snarl of ‘Look What You Made Me Do’. The ‘1989’ section is one brilliant sucker-punch after another; from ‘Style’ to ‘Blank Space’, ‘Shake It Off’ and ‘Bad Blood’, you quickly come to realise that this is why Swift is now the biggest pop star on the planet.
The lyrics of every single song are screamed back tenfold at the Pennsylvania woman; never before has a crowd made such an effort to go glam. Sequins, cowboy hats, glitter and red lipstick are the Swiftie uniform - along with the requisite armful of friendship bracelets, of course - and it’s genuinely heartwarming to see so many young kids, perhaps at their first-ever gig, so moved by the might of a magnificent show.
If we’re really nitpicking, it’s a long show - perhaps too long, at times - and Swift’s dedication to the folky singalongs from the aforementioned ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ (both written while she imagined herself in Ireland, she claims) take the sting out of the setlist, although it seems that most of the crowd would disagree. Indeed, the ovation she receives after Champagne Problems lasts for several minutes and even Swift herself seems lost for words. ‘We’ve done, what… 110 shows on this tour?,” she asks her band, shaking her head in disbelief. “And we were just not prepared for the level you’re on, Dublin. What you just did for us, we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.”
It’s fair to say that it’s a sentiment that most of the audience will share, too. Swiftie or not, this was everything that a pop show should be - all three hours and twenty minutes of it.
