When Taylor Swift comes onto stage singing Cruel Summer to open her show, you wonder if she ever followed age-old parental advice that it's better to save the best part of the meal for last.
Why would she start a show with one of her best, most upbeat songs (which has one of the best song bridges of all time). Talk about setting a high bar.
But as the show progresses it's clear the entire show is dessert. The best parts of the Eras Tour meal is absolutely everything. And Swift continues to sail over the high bar she has set for herself.
It's her third show in Sydney, and her penultimate show for this Australian tour. The middle shows don't necessarily have the allure or excitement of the first show in a city or the climax a last show is supposed to have. All that is thrown out the window in Swift's case.
The Eras Tour is worth all the hype. It's three-and-a-half hours of pure joy.
It's essentially nine concerts in one as Swift takes us through her different "eras", or albums, including four which have never been toured as they were made and released during the pandemic. She tells the crowd she wrote as much as "humanly possible" during the pandemic and there is a lot of catching up to do.
The show starts with the fun-loving, colourful Lover era, from 2019. It's a kaleidoscope of pastel with a screen showcasing a house. Swift invites her fans to sing along to the bridge from Cruel Summer and it's one of the loudest moments of the night.
As the Lover era comes to an end, the aforementioned house on the screen erupts with fireworks. The gold fireworks stream down and the concert enters its Fearless era, one of Swift's earliest from 2008. The crowd goes wild as she sings her classic songs, including You Belong With Me and Love Story. With only three songs, it's a short-lived era.
Next is Evermore, one of the albums Swift wrote in the pandemic. It's a much slower era but it is one the crowd is enraptured by. The phone lights for the song Marjorie, which is about the singer's late grandmother, mark the most emotional moment of the night. Swift was clearly taken aback by the reaction to Champagne Problems, played on a moss-covered piano. "This feels like a hallucination," she tells the crowd, who will not stop screaming.
The contrast with the next era, Reputation, released in 2017, could not be more stark. This is her most edgy album, written in response to a media furore. Look What You Made Me Do is a highlight of the night; Swift's back-up dancers are fabulous in the performance.
Swift's concert has all the bells and whistles. It's a big, high-tech production, complete with wristbands for every crowd member that light up, creating a sea of colour. But in pared-back moments, Swift shows she could simply stand up there with a guitar for three hours and would still command the full attention of the crowd. This is most evident during her 10-minute hit All Too Well. The performance was a masterpiece.
The transitions between the eras was fascinating. A lot of the crowd would use the moments to take a seat and give their sore feet a reprieve but it was so momentary because Swift would come straight back on. Her boundless energy - even on her third night in a row - is something to be admired.
Folklore was Swift's first pandemic album and, like Evermore, it is slower, but it was incredible to see and the crowd screamed the songs like they would some of her more upbeat tunes. The 1989 era followed with Swift classics including Blank Space, Shake It Off and Bad Blood.
One of the best moments of the night came when Swift sang her surprise songs. At each concert she sings two songs not normally included in the setlist but the crowd were actually treated to four surprise songs as Swift sung two mash-ups, including Is It Over Now and Wish You Would (both songs from 1989 but only released last year in her re-recording) and Haunted (Speak Now) and Exile (Folklore). Swift was magnificent during the acoustic performances, which, like All Too Well, were just Swift on stage with an instrument.
The final era of the night was Midnights, Swift's most recent (not re-recorded) album. She was set among a dark blue stage with purple undertones. Her performance of Mastermind was stunning and she finished the show with Karma, complete with her full ensemble of dancers in different colour jackets and fireworks.
A stadium tour puts a lot of distance between a performer and the fans but Swift was able to overcome that barrier, especially when it was her and a guitar. People will naturally question the hype but this was something very special. This will go down as an important cultural marker, especially for the Millennials and Generation Zs.
It's a shame Swift can't be in more than two places at once because if she had double, possibly even triple, the number of shows people would go and it is a show you can see multiple times.
Swift started out her show in a bold way, and followed through all the way to the end. Each bite of her career-spanning performance was the best part of the meal.
- Lucy Bladen attended the Eras Tour as a guest of Frontier Touring.
