In London, Taylor Swift and Her Fans Are in Their “Fearless” Era
This week, Taylor Swift fans from around the world gathered anxiously in London to witness the end of an era—or at least the end of the European leg of the Eras Tour. In the days leading up to the first of five planned shows at Wembley Stadium, reports of increased security circulated. Other Swift shows have seen thousands of ticketless fans linger outside the official venue in a joyous overflow of Swiftian enthusiasm. But that would not be allowed at Wembley, which posted these rules on its Web site: “Anyone without a ticket should not travel to Wembley Stadium. No one is allowed to stand outside any entrance or on the Olympic Steps at the front of the stadium. Non ticket holders will be moved on.” In other words, no Tay-Gating.
The city was on edge following the abrupt—and, for some, devastating—cancellation of three Swift shows in Vienna the previous week. The concerts were called off after Austrian officials arrested two teen-agers accused of plotting a terrorist attack on the stadium where the gigs were scheduled to take place. (Later, a third teen was arrested.) Searching one of the suspect’s homes, investigators found explosives, knives, machetes, chemical substances, and evidence of an allegiance to ISIS. Tickets were refunded. Tears were shed. Heartbroken fans, dressed up in the cowboy hats and sequinned dresses they had planned to wear to the show, met in groups near the city center to sing and commiserate.
It has been a strange summer for Swifties. News of the foiled Vienna attack broke just over a week after a horrific stabbing took place at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class for kids in the seaside town of Southport, England. Three children were killed, and eight other kids and two adults were injured. The incident set off a wave of unrest in the U.K., as misinformation spread about the identity of the suspect, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana. Online, people claimed he was an immigrant who had arrived in the country by boat. In fact, he is a British citizen and was born in Wales. (His parents are from Rwanda.) Nevertheless, violent mobs in Southport, Rotherham, Liverpool, and several other cities took to the streets. The rioters attacked mosques, looted stores, set cars on fire, torched a library, and battered a hotel that was housing asylum seekers.
The riots have been the first real test for the U.K.’s new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who swept into office in July as head of the new Labour government. A former chief prosecutor, Starmer has taken a hard line on the rioters, calling the unrest “far-right thuggery” and vowing that participants “will feel the full force of the law.” Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, told the Mirror, “These thugs do not represent Britain.” By last week, anti-racism demonstrators sprang up in many of the locations where riots had been planned. According to the press, the counter-protesters far outnumbered the fringe individuals who became a hateful mob. Still, it has left Britain, at the height of August, uneasy.
On Thursday afternoon, however, the train to Wembley Stadium slowly filled with Swifties wearing friendship bracelets. At King’s Cross, where I boarded, a woman in a “1989” hat and an Eras Tour necklace gave me a bracelet that read “Reputation.” Two women with butterfly clips in their hair told me they had been planning this day for more than a year. “I’m dressed as the ‘Lover’ album,” one of them, Miriam Robledo, a twenty-five-year-old from Spain, told me. “It’s one of the few albums that’s focussed on love songs, not breakup songs, and I like that.” She was wearing a pink skirt and top and had painted her nails to match. Had the Vienna cancellations made them worried about security? “I think if we’re quick to get in, quick to get out, hopefully it’s O.K.,” Robledo said. “But it did make me a bit more nervous than your average concert.”
Exiting the train, concertgoers were met with a heavy police presence. A dad wearing a glitter backpack escorted his daughter through the crowds. Outside the station, people were buying feather boas and flashing cowboy hats from unofficial venders, and finishing their canned gin-and-tonics. (No outside drinks were allowed in the stadium.) “It’s nice to see everyone still in the spirit,” a young woman with heart-shaped makeup stencilled around her eyes told me. “It’s, like, you can’t knock people down.” Her friend added that she’d heard of altruistic Swifties giving their London tickets away to people who had missed out on the Vienna shows. “The community that Swift has had is just insane,” she said. “It’s like a family. It’s crazy.”
Emilia Lucke and Marlen Rudat, two teen-agers from Germany, were loitering at the base of the Olympic Steps outside the stadium, looking for tickets. “We got scammed,” Lucke told me, sadly, explaining that she and Rudat had each sent three hundred euros to an online seller who was supposed to give them their tickets in London, and had proceeded to ghost them. “We flew here from Germany and we still had hopes to get the tickets until, like, four-thirty, but, yeah, we got scammed.” She was wearing flower earrings and a peasant skirt, and had face gems around the corners of her eyes. Rudat had on a sequinned miniskirt. They planned to see if online ticket prices would drop once Swift came onstage. Otherwise, “we might, like, go to the hotel and watch a live stream,” she said. They were still having a pretty good time. “All the people here are so nice, and we traded a lot of bracelets. That was really sweet.”
As the show got under way, a small crowd of ticketless Swifties began singing along from outside the venue. A police officer I spoke with told me it was fine for them to be there as long as they didn’t try to climb the stadium steps. Someone brought out a bubble maker. A woman named Carmelle Manalo had brought her seven-year-old daughter and her niece to soak up the atmosphere. Manalo had tickets for Saturday’s show, but she hadn’t been able to get them for the kids—she made them a book of lyrics from the set list instead. Manalo was happy that the London concerts hadn’t been called off. “We were really scared at first that Vienna was cancelled because we’ve been waiting, like, a year for this,” she told me. There had also been riots near her town of Gillingham, Kent. But she had been reassured that Wembley was safe. “The security is really tight here, so we’re just crossing fingers and then just checking the Web site for any updates.”
The crowd had grown a little larger and was singing along to “22”: “It feels like one of those nights!” Four friends from Finland had tickets for the following night’s show; they had stopped by to pick up swag ahead of time from one of the merch tents. “We wanted to buy them today so we can wear them tomorrow,” one Finn, Pauliina Pitkänen, told me. They had been planning their trip for a year. “It’s becoming reality now!” another said.
Did they feel safe? “I feel like everywhere I look I can see security guys, so I feel safe,” Pitkänen said. I looked around at the police in hi-vis yellow jackets. She added, “I’m thinking, I can’t live in fear. I can’t do anything—I can’t leave my house—if I’m living in fear. So, I’m just, like, They’re doing a great job, they’re doing their jobs, and we’ll just enjoy.” Nearby, the German girls who had been scammed were doing cancan kicks. ♦
