Pop’s all-conquering market leader Taylor Swift arrives in Glasgow for the first night of her UK tour, enhanced by a preternatural glow of achievement.
Days ago, the Pennsylvanian-born singer scored a coup for artists’ rights by withholding her 8.6m-selling 2014 album, 1989, from Apple Music’s new streaming service, in protest at royalties not being paid during the service’s promotional launch period. (She previously pulled a similar move on Spotify.) The tech giant capitulated – humbly, quickly – via tweet. This story – one that also involves a lobby of independent labels, the wider debate over music’s monetary value and, now, a disgruntled UK photographer, who contests Swift’s own stranglehold over her image rights – is, of course, more complex than a 140-character rendering allows for. But publicly taking a bite out of Apple is just the latest win for a woman who has become an industry force, selling truckloads of albums in a rapidly contracting market.
The 1989 show, heavy on the new songs, opens with the customary whiz-bang of an arena tour, with light-up bracelets pulsating on every wrist, a New York skyline and a stage set that recalls the musical theatrics of Broadway and classic film – perhaps a little too often.
Light-up umbrellas and a digital downpour for This Is How You Get the Girl nod at Singin’ in the Rain.The mighty Bad Blood, a song Swift rendered in video as a futuristic Kill Bill-style thriller with a guest verse from Kendrick Lamar, has now been reduced to am-dram West Side Story, dancers pushing one another around.
I Know Places – about how Swift can disappear if she wants to – has doors being wheeled around by dancers, looking like removal men in Mexican wrestling masks, rather than pursuers bursting in on young lovers.
Fans all know how much New York has meant to Swift – her first taste of proper adult life outside Nashville, where she made her name as a teen country star – but the reliance on classic Broadway visual tropes shows a regrettable lack of imagination in an artist who has plenty of presentational smarts. Only grown-up pop critics will notice this, but Coldplay did the light-bracelets first a few years ago. For all Swift’s 2012 crossover hit We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together works anew as a noisy rock song, with Swift hammering out power chords on an electric guitar and ululating bluesily, the visuals recall the video for the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army, all red, black and white images rushing forwards towards the viewer.
Swift does throw some good curveballs, though. The huge hit from her Red album of 2012, I Knew You Were Trouble, is unrecognisable in the first few bars, with Swift lit in red, sitting down as though exhausted by passion, singing languidly at half-speed, more sultry than she usually permits herself to be. She also cracks up quite naturally when a dancer pretends to be a cat pawing to be let in at a window, which looks unscripted. But there isn’t the sense of revelation present at her last tour, when the prospect of a pop star who could walk and chew gum at the same time, and so far from a stripper’s pole, was a cause for joy.
The night’s best frisson actually occurs offstage. Two Swifties in the audience are approached by an older woman as they dance along to Blank Space, one of the best tracks of the night. In the lyrics, Swift parodies herself as some sort of a high-maintenance femme fatale, a reference to a love life lived in the glare of paparazzi and Instagram. The girls scream. The woman hands them wristbands.
It used to be that lecherous rock bands sent out scouts to ferry the most nubile young things backstage. When these girls are given passes, it is to the most wholesome and sisterly of aftershows – the meet-and-greet that Swift hosts after most gigs. Sisterliness matters to Swift. It is, perhaps, one of her greatest non-musical assets, asserting the strength of female friendships. (That, and her commitment to underlining “how difficult it is to be happy”, and intervening in her fans’ lives, paying off a student loan here, baking cookies there.)
Tonight’s costume changes find Swift’s coterie – Lena Dunham, Selena Gomez, Cara Delevingne, plus a bevy of knicker models – attesting on video to how fabulous Swift is. Sometimes it’s cute – Dunham calls Swift “the patron saint of cats” as the singer struggles to contain one of her truculent moggies. One of Haim refers to Swift as “the sister I never had”, while her sisters look on, deadpan. After a while, though, it’s overkill.
The passes are not the only reason the girls are hyperventilating, though. The woman handing out wristbands is Taylor Swift’s mother, Andrea. Like everything to do with Swift – her cats, Olivia and Meredith, currently being cat-sat by Scottish DJ Calvin Harris, or Swift’s childhood best friend, Alison, who gets the biggest scream of all the famous besties on film – Andrea is public property, doubly so since Swift recently went public with her mother’s cancer diagnosis.
Much of 1989, Swift’s blockbuster fifth album, ponders what went wrong between Swift and various beaux in detail (snowmobiles, stitches, that “James Dean look”). It is something of a roman à clef for the celebrity age, where a song called Style can cleverly use the notion of certain looks coming back into fashion, to illustrate an on-again, off-again relationship (possibly with someone whose surname was Styles).
Swift’s between-song interjections occasionally overshadow the main event. This is Swift’s first-ever gig in Glasgow, she says, and she reveals she got an email from her dad, imploring her to tell Scotland how Scottish their roots are. “I happen to love Scottish people, personally,” Swift teases at one point, surely a barely coded reference to her relationship with Harris. (The internet has been abuzz with speculation as to whether Harris’s parents might be here tonight, though quite why the parents of her latest partner would need to sit through this many songs about Swift’s former partners is a moot point.)
If sharing (over-sharing, perhaps, if you’re aged over 30) is how we live now, Swift is undoubtedly the poet laureate of the life/art cusp, the master of the barely fictionalised kiss-and-tell, a high-wire act she performs brilliantly. She might just need a new tour producer.
