Taylor Swift Breaks The Wembley Stadium Record As Her UK Tour Comes To A Conclusion
Taylor Swift wrapped up the European leg of her Eras Tour with a record-breaking performance at Wembley Stadium that was full of surprises.
The pop queen was joined on stage by Florence + The Machine and Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff, who rewarded fans with the debut of a new music video and the first live performance of her song So Long, London.
It was Swift’s sixth concert at Wembley this summer, breaking Michael Jackson’s Bad Tour record from 1988.
“You just made me the first solo artist to ever play Wembley eight times in a single tour,” she told her supporters. “We will never, ever be able to thank you enough for it.”
The star’s eighth Wembley gig also saw her equal the overall record for the most nights at the facility on a single tour, which was previously held by Take That on their Progress Tour in 2011.
‘This is the best.’
The star’s headline-grabbing tour has crisscrossed Europe this summer, with the Wembley finale marking the 131st leg in her two-year journey.
In the United Kingdom alone, she performed for about 1.2 million people, generating an estimated £1 billion for the country’s economy.
A team of geophysicists in Edinburgh even recorded seismic waves caused by people dancing at Murrayfield Stadium, causing the earth to move by a maximum of 23.4 nanometres (nm) during the song Ready For It?
The London performances were a high point, with Swift performing there more than any other city on her tour.
“I’ve always loved playing for you here in London, but this is the best,” she remarked during Tuesday’s final show.
“I’ve never had it so amazing before. “I’ve never had a crowd that generous.”You appear to have memorised every single phrase to every single song, which is a dream come true.”
She made the final show count by bringing out Florence Welch of Florence & The Machine for a duet on the song Florida!!!
The British singer’s presence elicited a wave of shouts as the two stars stood face-to-face, roaring the chorus at each other at the end of a catwalk.
But any loyal Swiftie knows that the real highlight of the Eras Tour is the acoustic performance, where she performs two “surprise songs” that aren’t on the schedule.
Last week, Ed Sheeran joined the singer to perform Endgame and Thinking Out Loud.
Jack Antonoff, one of her key collaborators on Grammy-winning albums such as Folklore and Midnights, accompanied her on her final date at Wembley.
They performed a guitar-based medley of Death Thousand Cuts and Getaway Car By.
To fans’ pleasure, the duo conducted a silly reenactment of the Getaway Car recording session, during which they wrote the song’s bridge in a 30-second flash of inspiration.
So Long, London. I Played For The First Time
Swift then continued her acoustic set at the piano, performing the live debut of So Long, London from her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department.
Fans have been guessing for days whether she will play the song, which is popularly believed to be about her breakup with British actor Joe Alwyn last year.
The couple was thought to have resided in Primrose Hill during the pandemic, and Swift had previously composed a song called London Boy in his honor.
However, the six-year romance ended last year, a month after Swift launched her Eras Tour in North America.
On So Long, London, she sings about the end of a London-based affair: “You left me at the house by the Heath…” And I’m upset that you let me give you all that youth for nothing.
But The Surprises Did Not Stop With The Acoustic Set
After the three-and-a-half-hour event, Swift exited the stage and played a brand new music video on the stadium’s large screens as people began to leave.
Featuring brand new behind-the-scenes footage, it provided an insight into the immense size of the Eras tour, with Swift traveling under the stage on train tracks and performing the ambitious “stage dive” that has become a concert highlight.
The video was accompanied by I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, a highlight of her most recent album that describes how the first leg of her tour was overshadowed by the emotional impact of her breakup with Alwyn.
“All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘More’,” she says in the pre-chorus.
This summer’s shows, however, have been set against a much more somber backdrop.
On July 29, three young girls were killed in a horrific incident during a Taylor Swift-themed dancing lesson in Southport.
A few weeks later, the artist was forced to cancel three shows in Vienna after security prevented a possible attack on her fans at the Ernst Happel Stadium.
Swift is said to have personally reached out to the victims of the Southport stabbing, releasing a statement stating she was “at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families.”.
However, she has not mentioned either incident on stage, choosing to focus on the sense of community that has become the Eras tour’s distinguishing feature, with fans exchanging friendship bracelets and making new friendships every night.
The tour has even generated a spreadsheet-based side business, recording every outfit variation and surprise song played along the way.
The show’s characters are so familiar to Swift fans that they now join in with her written stage name (“Welcome to the Eras Tour!”) as frequently as her song lyrics.
It gives a sense of camp to the proceedings, like a sanitized pop remix of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Swift soaked up the praise on stage at Wembley Stadium, calling it “a privilege to do the thing I love in front of any size crowd at all.”.
At a previous event in Liverpool, she had similarly described the Eras Tour as the “most exhausting, all-encompassing, but most joyful, rewarding, and wonderful thing that has ever happened in my life.”.
The 34-year-old will now take a well-deserved break before resuming the tour for one final trip throughout the United States and Canada in the fall.
When it reaches its last date in Vancouver in December, it will have earned an estimated $2 billion in ticket sales alone.
Without a doubt, it will make it the largest tour of all time, with revenues more than double Elton John’s farewell tour, which held the previous record.
The major question is, what will Swift do then?
