It’s certainly the biggest pop music tour of all time by revenue, and arguably also by the more nebulous measure of pop-cultural heft. We’re 97 concerts in, and Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has already grossed well over a billion dollars, generated nearly as many friendship bracelets, caused a series of massively viral fits of weeping and screaming and now the UK finally gets to experience it, as Eras opens at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium on Friday night. If you haven’t already been plotting a finely detailed spreadsheet complete with loo breaks, here’s what to expect.
The core set list
Unless she decides to go seriously off-piste, 37 of the songs in the set list are locked in, as they haven’t deviated in the 96 shows so far. She always opens with Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince, and always closes with Karma. In between you will have, in alphabetical de-Era-fied order: All Too Well, Anti‐Hero, August, Bad Blood, Bejeweled, Betty, Blank Space, Cardigan, Champagne Problems, Cruel Summer, Delicate, Don’t Blame Me, Enchanted, Fearless, I Knew You Were Trouble, Illicit Affairs, Karma, Lavender Haze, Look What You Made Me Do, Love Story, Lover, Marjorie, Mastermind, Midnight Rain, My Tears Ricochet, Ready for It?, Shake It Off, Style, The Man, 22, Vigilante Shit, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, Wildest Dreams, Willow, You Belong With Me and You Need to Calm Down.
There’ll also be the six-song selection she’s added from The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), which has run in the following order: But Daddy I Love Him/So High School, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?, Down Bad, Fortnight, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived and I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.
The surprise songs
More than her 43-song core set list, her multi-instrumentalism and her preparatory cardio workouts done while singing, Swift’s biggest flex in Eras is actually the two-song surprise section just before the closing run of songs from Midnights: it’s Swift letting us peer into the jaw-dropping depth of the songbook she has amassed by the age of just 34.
So far this has encompassed dozens of other songs from her back catalogue, ranging from debut single Tim McGraw at her opening show in Glendale, Arizona on 17 March, to TTPD’s Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus at her most recent gig in Lyon. She has a slight preference for Clean, Maroon and You’re on Your Own, Kid, but she’s gone so deep that there aren’t actually that many songs from her main album discography that she hasn’t played yet: only 32, 12 of them from TTPD. You can imagine a couple of London-centric songs from that album – The Black Dog and So Long, London – could pop up in the Wembley Stadium run (though certainly not London Boy, her tour of the capital she wrote when swooning over her now-ex, the English actor Joe Alwyn).
The backing band
Swift tours with a 10-piece band historically known as the Agency, some of whom have been with her for years. She has a wonderfully fond rapport with guitarist Paul Sidoti, who has the hair of a disgruntled 00s female EastEnders character and the unobtrusive yet occasionally showboating dexterity of the best arena-pop players. It’s his 17th year playing with Swift, having joined her for her self-titled debut back in 2007, while bassist Amos Heller has been part of the band for just as long, and musical director David Cook is another veteran who has previously overseen the world tours for Speak Now, Red and 1989. Her pianist meanwhile has the wonderfully nominatively deterministic name of Karina DePiano.
There’s also a troupe of dancers, and much has been made among Swift-haters as to her relative lack of choreographic sophistication compared to other pop stars at her level. OK, there’s certainly a lot of walking up and down the central catwalk with purpose – but there’s also a potent gal-pal rapport that mirrors the female friendships throughout the crowd, and a greater focus on this tour on male sexuality. The choreo is ultimately perhaps a part of the endearing ordinariness that offsets Swift’s ludicrous talent and prowess to make her such a beloved star.
The support acts
The main tour support in the UK is Paramore, who had their breakthrough around the same time as Swift’s (in 2007) and have been on a similarly genre-crossing journey ever since, going from emo-laced pop-punk to groove-laden new wave. After a few dates not playing their biggest hit Misery Business, and totally disowning it in 2018, they’ve been playing it at recent Swift gigs – at her request, frontwoman Hayley Williams told one crowd – in a terrifically crowd-pleasing crop of nine songs including Ain’t It Fun, Still Into You, Hard Times and their recently recorded cover of Talking Heads’ Burning Down the House.
Wembley-goers get some extra support acts in the form of US singer Mette, whose superbly funky 2023 track Van Gogh has me sliding around my kitchen in my socks on the regular (21 June); Griff, a British singer very much in the Swiftian mould of confessional emotional pop, whose brilliant recent single Miss Me Too bafflingly didn’t chart but is an object lesson in how to do heavily produced bombast (22 June); and handsomely moustachioed US feelings-haver Benson Boone, playing his No 1 hit Beautiful Things and more (23 June).
The special guests
Swift has occasionally brought out surprise guest vocalists during the Eras run: the likes of Marcus Mumford, Maren Morris, Jack Antonoff, Ice Spice, Phoebe Bridgers, Gracie Abrams and Sabrina Carpenter, plus a few appearances from recent creative foil Aaron Dessner of the National. I wonder if Florence Welch might appear for TTPD collabo Florida!!!, which hasn’t yet had an airing in the surprise song slot. There’s also an as-yet unfulfilled opportunity to do Castles Crumbling with its original guest vocalist, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, and the tour timings are perfect for Lana Del Rey to turn up for Midnights’ Snow on the Beach: she’s finishing up some European festival dates this week. Could we see Haim after Swift appeared at their O2 Arena show in 2022? Post Malone for TTPD’s biggest hit Fortnight?
The merch
Whether driven by a genuine desire to flesh out her sonic world, or by generating loads of cash via schemes that can have a bearing on her clearly obsessed-over chart performance, Swift is a master of product and her merch queues resemble those more often seen for Disneyland rides. This tour’s offerings start at £10 for three postcards and go up to £75 for hoodies or a blanket emblazoned with Swift’s face, which doubles as the most appropriate thing to enshroud yourself in during a painful breakup with TTPD on repeat. There’s also a £35 gold-plated version of the friendship bracelets fans share with each other, which feels like it’s rather missing the point, but they’re useful for any offspring of oligarchs in attendance who are keen on buying affection.
The hidden details
The show is peppered with sweet moments to look out for, such as Swift handing her hat to a child in the crowd at the end of 22, and her trompe l’oeil dive into a “swimming pool” in the stage prior to the Midnights section. Part of the fun is trying to spot changes and hidden messages in the staging – particularly all the Swift outfits of yesteryear worn by her dancers in the Reputation section (Architectural Digest has a good guide to that and the other set designs). Even her manicure was pored over for meaning at the tour’s outset, while fans suggested the debut of a new bodysuit for the Europe run was in homage to footballer boyfriend Travis Kelce, matching the red-orange colourway of his Kansas City Chiefs kit. And last week Vogue’s Margaux Anbouba suggested that a subtle change in eyeliner from earlier dates – “thicker, sharper, edgier” – was a veiled reference to the edgy sound of Reputation, the re-recording of which is much anticipated but still yet to be announced. That’s arguably a reach – but Swift did announce her previous re-recording project, for 1989, at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium, so UK fans are hoping to be given that next piece of Taylor news first.
