MCG crowd rises as one in praise of pop royalty as Taylor Swift conquers all

At the biggest concert of the biggest tour in music history, Taylor Swift put in a stunning shift that affirmed her position in the pantheon of pop greats.

Taylor Swift performs at the MCG on Friday during the first of her seven Australian concerts in the Eras tour. Picture: TAS Rights Management

At the biggest concert of the biggest tour in music history, Taylor 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, as she did at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Friday night, 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 largest stadium she has ever headlined, all on her lonesome.

The extras – her band, dancers and backing vocalists – were revealed later, in a series of dramatic shifts that set the MCG alight.

It was fitting, then, that the most successful touring artist in pop history 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 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.

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 at the centre of ­attention. Ringed by near capacity ­stadium crowd, 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 rise.

For many young fans, this run of shows will be their first taste of live music. For weeks, the hype has been both deafening and blinding. When she last toured here in late 2018, there was a buzz, but her visit wasn’t singled out for too much special attention: just another stadium-sized pop musician strutting her stuff.

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 – 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.

For The Eras Tour, about 630,000 tickets were sold so quickly that the promoter, ­Frontier Touring, could easily have sold 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.

Judging by the enormous ­demand, and the wide and intense public interest in all things Swift at present, they might have even been able to sell four times that number and still left some people disappointed.

But it wasn’t in the cards. Seven concerts in two cities is what Swift agreed to, before the tour moves on to Singapore and beyond.

Taylor Swift will perform in Melbourne on Saturday and Sunday, followed by Sydney from February 23 to 26.