Taylor Swift overcomes cold to electrify crowd of 73,000 in Edinburgh — live review - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
FT商学院

Taylor Swift overcomes cold to electrify crowd of 73,000 in Edinburgh — live review

The megastar was warmly greeted but temporarily frozen on the first stop of her UK tour at Murrayfield Stadium

If familiarity breeds contempt, then Taylor Swift should be getting roundly scorned. Unfamiliarity with the pop hegemon has become a near impossible condition as she traverses the globe with her record-breaking Eras tour. Since it began in March 2023, she has released three hit albums, had 27 songs chart in the US top 20 and released the highest grossing tour film ever. Totting up the hours of listening and watching, I have probably spent more time in her company than with some of my closest friends.

To this can now be added the three hours and 20 minutes of her Eras show at Murrayfield stadium in Edinburgh. The first of three nights at the venue, it marked the arrival of the tour on British shores. Loch Tay in the Scottish Highlands had been renamed Loch Tay Tay for the occasion. In Edinburgh city centre, glitter and Taylor-themed apparel were ubiquitous: gold minidresses, cowboy boots and hats, glittery leotards — audacious outfitting for a fresh Scottish summer evening.

An immense caravan of tweens plus parental chaperones, teenage girls and young women headed towards the near 73,000-capacity stadium. (Some of the menfolk wore American football tops bearing the name of Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs.) Most of the Swifties present would have already seen the show — not in the flesh, but on screen. The concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (worldwide box office gross $261mn) came out in the middle of the Eras tour itself (projected ticket revenue, more than $2bn). 

This gave the event an odd kind of familiarity. It risked breeding not contempt but a nagging feeling of surfeit. So while the singer’s entrance was spectacular, hey-prestoed from within a cocoon of fabric on a runway stage to ear-busting acclaim, her opening sequence of songs had a slightly perfunctory feel. Opening number “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” was truncated: it deserved more. The burlesque revue for “The Man” — Taylor as corporate alpha in bright pinstripe jacket with dancers dressed as office workers — was fun but throwaway. However, any hint of staleness vanished as the momentum picked up. 

Epic in length, with more than 40 songs and a vast amount of stagecraft, the tour is spectacularly ambitious. Its setlist is broken into “eras”, each representing a different album from her discography. At Murrayfield, a huge screen for visuals on the main stage was flanked on either side by backing musicians. A long runway extended towards a thrust stage over halfway down the pitch. Swift, alone or accompanied by back-up singers and dancers, used the space very adroitly, mixing up the movement and viewing angles. Costume changes were done quickly, sometimes on stage from beneath a canopy of feathers or umbrellas held by her dancers. 

She knew where the cameras for the big screen were, ending songs by spinning on her heels to fix the lens with a meaningful stare. Yet she was also attentive to the different areas of her large audience. A solo acoustic-guitar version of “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” was interrupted when she spotted a stricken audience member. During the same song, her guitar-picking hand was frozen into a claw by the evening chill, to her amused consternation. This was an unfamiliar occurrence: it had never happened to her before.

The setlist also had a degree of unfamiliarity, rejigged to incorporate her latest album The Tortured Poets Department. Its literary theme has inspired a striking new costume: Taylor in an elaborately cut white dress with copperplate writing on it, like a sartorial volume of poetry. During the gothic-pop of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, she stood on a mobile box that moved across the stage via an unseen force, forcing dancers to recoil as she pointed at them in the manner of a Marvel superhero. Dance number “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” was set to old-school Busby Berkeley routines with tailcoats and canes.

Amid all this choreography, Swift’s appealingly flowing singing style continued without pause. (Her breath control is an under-appreciated skill.) Each word was sung back at her by the tens of thousands in the stadium. Their familiarity with the songs, and also the gestures that the singer made while singing them, was opposite to contempt. It made the atmosphere electric, a shared peak with the world’s biggest pop star.

taylorswift.com

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

Thrive Capital:多样化是给那些不知道自己在做什么的人准备的

乔什•库什纳旗下的这家年轻的风投公司以大手笔投资OpenAI而闻名,颠覆了传统的风险投资模式。它能得到真正的收益吗?

谁要买Chrome?

关于储蓄的思考。

将谷歌和Chrome浏览器分开是好办法吗?

呼吁这家搜索巨头剥离Chrome浏览器,会给用户带来他们显然不想要的东西。

高增长并不能说明美国经济的全貌

令人印象深刻的头条数字对民主党没有帮助。

没有学位也没问题:美国雇主不再局限于大学文凭

IBM、通用汽车和沃尔玛等公司正专注于申请人的技能,而不是教育。

阿达尼丑闻将动摇印度股市替代中国的努力

就在几个月前,印度股票被视为全球投资者投资组合中中国股票的可行替代,但此次事件使人们重新关注当地股票的风险和高昂估值。
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×