Taylor Swift Melbourne concert review: The Eras Tour begins for Australian fans
A single song in an exhaustive 45-track set list proved to all 96,000 fans at Taylor Swift’s Melbourne show why these tickets are the most coveted in Australian live music history | WATCH
Almost two hours into the first Australian concert of her world tour, Taylor Swift told the crowd that she had a song she wanted to play for them – but only if they had 10 minutes to spare.
As if there was any other possible answer than screamed affirmation.
As if the 96,000 in attendance at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Friday night had anything other than time for every note, word, gesture and melody that emerged from the woman at the centre of it all.
Wearing a full-length coat that glittered in red and black, Swift began strumming an acoustic guitar as she worked through the extended version of All Too Well, a 2011 track that chronicled in vivid detail a relationship’s rise and fall.
This wordy, moving narrative is an undeniable masterpiece of pop songwriting, and it might be her single best song amid a mightily packed field.
But as a single performance amid an exhaustive 45-track setlist, All Too Well is worth spending a few more moments examining here, for it contains the essence of Swift’s genius.
It’s a song rooted in apparent simplicity: a handful of guitar chords and a catchy recurring melody set amid a lyric laced with emotion, and painted using the full spectrum of the colour palette called life.
To call it a showstopper isn’t entirely accurate, for in truth, few attendees could have stopped themselves from moving and reacting to being in her presence even if they tried.
But as a central pillar of an extraordinarily well-constructed set, this 10-minute wonder was a pure highlight of a superlative night.
Studiously avoiding spoilers for what lay in store at The Eras Tour has taken some effort, but even those who knew well what was coming must have been impressed by witnessing the sheer spectacle in the flesh, while sharing it with a group of people whose hearts beat in sync for this generation-defining artist.
High expectations and live music can be a dangerous combination. Go to enough gigs and you might become conditioned to keep your hopes somewhere near the basement, so that if the experience doesn’t quite ascend to the top floor, you’re not left shattered with disappointment.
For weeks now, the hype surrounding this American musician’s visit has been simultaneously deafening and blinding. As the hours ticked down to showtime at the first of her seven concerts, saturation media coverage has risen to the same fevered pitch that Swift’s many fans have been humming for years.
When she last toured here in late 2018, there was a buzz, but her appearance wasn’t singled out for too much special attention: just another stadium-sized pop musician strutting her stuff.
But six years later, something akin to a swarm of hornets now surrounds Swift’s every move.
What has she done to deserve this? Written songs that connect en masse, and done it over and over again – which is one of the trickiest highwire acts in the performing arts.
By any measure, Swift is a gifted artist, not least because of the adoration her art inspires in her listeners. Popular music is not always synonymous with quality, but there’s nothing false about the way her songs make her fans feel.
That’s why this tour is a unicorn, and why these tickets are perhaps the most coveted in the history of the Australian live music industry.
Every concert promoter breathes a sigh of relief when they see two words appear on their ticketing reports: sold out.
For The Eras Tour, about 630,000 total tickets were sold so quickly that the promoter, Frontier Touring, could easily sell twice that number, which would have made it the highest-selling concert tour in the nation’s history, well beyond the million-ticket record set by Ed Sheeran in 2018.
One gets the feeling that, on any given night, this perfectly polished show would offer a surfeit of riches, no matter where on the globe it was performed.
Yet its Australian debut on Friday offered some curious novelties, not least of which was that the MCG is the largest venue in the world where she has headlined a concert.
Acknowledging this fact was top of mind for Swift, who paused on several occasions to drink in the view.
After playing a piano ballad named Champagne Problems, an extended applause break had her reeling. “I’m having such a crazy moment in my brain tonight,” she said, trying to find the right words. “I get to be here?”
At her biggest concert amid the biggest tour in music history, then, Swift put in a stunning shift that affirmed her position in the pantheon of pop greats.
Anyone who can hold 96,000 people in the palm of her hand for 210 minutes is an artist of redoubtable quality.
Taking to the stage at 7.30pm sharp, the 34-year-old opened with Cruel Summer, a song that put her in the middle of the stadium, all on her lonesome.
Her stage was built in the shape of a T-bar at the tip that extended into the audience, while a long catwalk connected to a large diamond area in the middle then onto a wide stage beneath the big screen. It took up a lot of real estate, but the space was used well.
The extras – her fellow musicians, dancers and backing vocalists – were revealed later, in a series of dramatic shifts that set the MCG alight.
But it was fitting that she spent a good chunk of the concert in the thick of it alone. The meaning was clear: this is her era by a country mile, and any contender for her pop crown might well be waiting a long time to come close to matching what she has to offer.
Designed as a showcase of her discography, the towering setlist contained songs from all of her albums released thus far except her 2006 debut.
Early on, she told the crowd: “We’ve got a lot to catch up on. Anyone here for the first time? I’m so happy to see you. The show is designed for whether you’re new here, or if you’ve been here for 15 years. It’s like a trip down memory lane for me. I’ve put out a lot of albums recently. You see, the issue when you put out five albums in a couple of years is that you need to think outside the box.”
Minor quibbles with that proposition aside – don’t most artists tend to play songs from most of their albums on tour? – it did offer a strong frame to break the lengthy set into distinctive brackets, both in terms of sonics and fashion.
Whether with an acoustic guitar or a microphone in hand, and whether she was performing choreographed moves or merely standing and admiring the masses gathered before her, Swift was never less than in control.
It was her sheer poise that shone through strongest. Rarely has a performer looked so natural or comfortable with being at the centre of attention.
While ringed by a near-capacity MCG – minus the section obscured by the stage at one end – as the clock struck 10pm, Swift and her offsiders were still going strong, prompting the crowd to its feet for a bracket of songs from her 2014 album, titled 1989.
Truthfully, though, the vast majority of those in attendance had not spent a second in their seats. At a show this immersive, captivating and ebullient, very few wanted to sit.
It was a decision that mirrored how you’re supposed to treat royalty: when a queen enters the room, it’s only good manners to stand.
So much had been said, written and opined about this tour before it reached our shores that the hype threatened to overshadow the occasion, or at least handicap it. How good could it really be, given the extraordinary mind-share Swift has captured recently?
One of the more shocking realisations to occur on Friday night, very early on, was how effortlessly easy she makes it all look. As though she hasn’t sweated over every line and every sound in every song; as though she and her fellow performers haven’t rehearsed every move within an inch of their lives.
But even seeing the seams of this monster in motion only boosted its appeal. Late in the set, there was a moment where the singer was walking back toward the giant screen, and as she turned her head to the beat, cameras in half a dozen locations captured the image of her smirking face, as the video editor cut to her looking right down the barrel of each lens.
It was that sort of show, where the top note heard was a long, low, golden tone.
So much effort, stamina and preparation is required for so many things to go right across three and a half hours.
The sound mix remained clear as a bell at all times, which I observed both from the floor and higher up in the stands – a minor miracle at a show of this scale, for which the production crew deserves major credit.
Each show on The Eras Tour contains a “secret song” bracket, wherein Swift selects two tracks from her deep catalogue to perform acoustically.
On Friday, she changed into a yellow dress, strapped on an acoustic guitar and first opted for the title track from her 2012 album Red – “One of my favourites,” she said, though that too must be a long list.
For the second song, she offered two glittering gems for the biggest crowd of her career: a few nuggets about her forthcoming album The Tortured Poets Department, including the existence of an unreleased track called The Bolter; and then, on moving to the piano, she performed a live debut of You’re Losing Me, a bonus track from 2022’s Midnights.
These little reveals sent her fans bananas, and the latter song was truly special, with Swift’s voice being echoed by tens of thousands of fans singing back at her, as the sound bounced between these two entities in a game of aural ping-pong.
Midnights was the era that ended the show, and it’s a little unnerving to think where she might take her artistry from here. The Eras Tour is already the highest-grossing concert tour in history, and she’s got gigs booked through to December.
A long stay in Australia wasn’t in the cards, for the show must go on: seven concerts in two cities is what Swift and her formidable team agreed to, before the tour moves elsewhere, to Singapore and beyond.
And seven shows is what they’ll deliver. Based on what we saw in Melbourne on Friday, this is a show without peer, even amid outrageously high expectations.
With breathtaking ease, the headline act and her supporting performers – as well as the army of unseen road crew, who checked all the boxes before the lights went down – together ascended from the basement to the top floor and held a stadium full of people up there in a marathon effort.
Outside the venue, as exhausted but elated children were guided by parents toward their homes, the same story was being told, again and again: Taylor came, Taylor saw, and Taylor conquered. All rise.
The Eras Tour continues in Melbourne on Saturday and Sunday, followed by Sydney from February 23 to 26.
