‘Like early Beatles’: Inside Taylor Swift’s first Australian tour
It’s almost impossible to believe now, but in 2009 Taylor Swift played at a country music festival in Thredbo | WATCH
It’s almost impossible to believe now, but in 2009, Taylor Swift played a show in Thredbo.
The 34-year-old pop juggernaut — who is currently in Australia, bringing her blockbuster Eras Tour to 450,000 adoring fans — was just an ambitious teenage songwriter, cutting her teeth in Nashville, when the country music promoter Rob Potts first came across her.
Potts, alongside the veteran concert promoter Michael Chugg, were working on putting together what would be the very first CMC Rocks Festival in Thredbo.
Potts’s son, Jeremy Dylan, who has been director of CMC Rocks since his father died in 2017, says that his father “Always had this ambition to build a bridge between Nashville and Australia.” For him, getting Swift on the CMC Rocks bill was a priority. “She was one of the first acts that he went after.”
“She was incredibly young, she was a teenager, but she was really building a reputation in the country world and I think he saw her maybe even before her first record came out,” Dylan says.
“At the time, she was seen as a songwriting prodigy because she was 15-16 years old and writing these incredibly well crafted songs.”
Swift was initially booked to play the inaugural edition of the festival in 2008, just after her debut eponymous album was released. But a clash in her touring schedule meant she was moved to play the following year. “She wasn’t even big enough to do one of the headline shows, quite yet,” says Dylan.
The promoters booked three headline shows across the East Coast around Swift’s CMC Rocks appearance: one show at The Tivoli in Brisbane (1500 capacity), two at 170 Russell in Melbourne (1050 capacity), and one at The Factory Theatre in Sydney (800 capacity).
Dylan, who was 18 at the time, remembers struggling to get any press coverage for the shows.
“We were out there really hustling, trying to call in favours and begging people to interview her or cover the tour,” recalls Dylan. “No one was interested because, at the time, there was a real aversion to country music in mainstream media and radio here.”
“The idea that this teenage country singer was anything … everyone was laughing at us basically.”
But then, ‘Love Story’ — Swift’s first mainstream crossover hit — happened, and everything changed.
Watch Taylor Swift perform Love Story live in Thredbo
Dylan recalls a day when he was on the train from his home in North Ryde to his office in the city, and hearing a young girl listening to the song from her phone, and thinking “Wow, this doesn’t look like a country fan, and I’m not in a rural part of the state — something’s happening here.”
In the months that followed, every single date of Swift’s Australian tour sold out. The audience was a mix of early country adopters, and young Swift fanatics. “It’s such a cliche, but my memory of those shows is how loud the audience was. I never had, and haven’t since, experienced an audience have that level of frenzy of admiration. It was like all the descriptions of early Beatles concerts.”
“It was way more than ‘we just love these songs’ and ‘we love this artist’ — it was a deep, personal connection and identification with her.”
He remembers that at the show, Swift entered the stage wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans, and halfway through performing her first song ‘You Belong With Me,’ she pulled them off to reveal a spangly gold dress. “The crowd just went nuts. It was this great metaphor for, ‘hey, I’m just like you — but also, I’m this incredible superstar.”
In the fourteen years since Swift first toured Australia, both she and CMC Rocks have grown astronomically — the festival, which first held 2-3000 people in Thredbo, now plays to around 23,000 people in Queensland.
When asked if he has observed any changes in the country industry since Swift’s mainstream ascension, Dylan says that the fans have gotten younger — and country has, to outsiders, gotten cooler.
“Swift is the biggest pop star on Earth, but when she first crossed over, she was crossing over with country songs,” he says. “I think she was the first artist of that generation who built a bridge between country music and pop music in a way that showed the audience what country music was.”
“I think that [Swift] was the first thing that showed radio that they could take a chance on a country song, and they might get rewarded for that.”
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