When you’re 15 (or 52) and Taylor Swift tells you she loves you, you’re going to believe it. “I love you, Dublin,” she said in the Aviva Stadium as we screamed and sang and danced and rattled our friendship bracelets.
“Nobody does it like you, Dublin,” she said. And maybe she says that to all the cities, but myself and my 15-year-old twin daughters took it to heart. Everything the Swiftie Army said was true. The Eras Tour is not just a concert experience. It is an epic mutual romance for the ages. It’s a love story. Dublin just said yes.
We’ve been loving and listening to Taylor since the girls were toddlers. I played (admittedly terrible) guitar to accompany them while they sang The Best Day, Taylor’s tribute to her own mother, Andrea, at a school concert when they were eight. We danced around the kitchen to Shake It Off when she released her album 1989. We swooned as a family over her pandemic-releases Folklore and Evermore. We bought Midnights on vinyl and more recently made it our business to learn all the words to the songs she’d be playing on the European leg of her Eras tour from her latest release The Tortured Poets Department.
We’ve been waiting for this concert the way we count the days down to Christmas. Ten more sleeps to Taylor. Three more sleeps!
After the frantic panic and privilege of securing tickets we luxuriated for months in delicious anticipation. I queued up with other Swifties of all ages to get my T-shirt printed by the lovely woman in the Ilac Centre. I borrowed my chosen lyrics from her song Nothing New which she performs with Phoebe Bridgers. “How can a person know everything at 18, but nothing at 22?” On my T-shirt the 22 is crossed out and replaced by a more accurate 52. The notion that her lyrics speak only to teenagers or 20-somethings is one of the many fictions that swirl around the star. Anyway, this middle-aged woman’s inner teenager was well and truly activated. I hadn’t been this excited to see a pop star since Wham! in the RDS, 1984.
And then finally after all the waiting and planning and dreaming we were there with 49,997 other similarly minded, sequinned and cowboy-booted and customised T-shirted others. It was rare. We were there. On the stadium’s lower balcony in summer air, watching Taylor Swift shimmer and shimmy across the stage.
We had seats but my daughters didn’t use them. Seating was cheating, they reasoned. I, on the other hand, took little breaks during the slower numbers. A few seats away, Ryan Tubridy confessed to not actually being a Swiftie – “I’m more of a Paul McCartney man” – but appeared blown away by the exhilarating atmosphere, swapping suspiciously well-crafted friendship bracelets with my daughters.
“Anti-hero” one of them read. “I think he might have bought them in a shop,” a daughter said, comparing them with her more rustic home-made efforts. Beside him, small girls and their mothers lined up shyly for selfies. Tubridy, forever the Toy Man to people who couldn’t care less about behind-the-scenes RTÉ drama, proved a huge draw before the main event.
The night’s main drama though was provided by the 34-year-old American woman strutting down a stage in a sparkly bodysuit blitzing through close to 50 of her stunning songs. “This is the best night of my life,” my daughter whispered to me somewhere between the nearly five-minute screamathon that followed Champagne Problems and the opening notes of Style.
We screamed all night, the way I imagine I’d have screamed for Macca and The Beatles had I been around back then. We screamed for Taylor. For ourselves. For the joy that fizzed from our every pore during this more than three-hour love fest. We sang every word of every song. I had practised the trickier bits of You Need To Calm Down and was delighted with myself that, when it counted, I remembered the rapid fire line in which Taylor admonishes online trolls: “You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace and control your urges to scream about all the people you hate.” Yes!
We did not control our urges to scream for Taylor. We screamed about never getting back together “like, ever”. We screamed about “getting down to this sick beat”. We sang about Betty and Illicit Affairs and Sweet Nothing. We sang her wise, wounded, lyrical, evocative words back to her and we sang them to each other. We sang to the mostly women and girls of all ages everywhere, to the strangers in other rows, every one of us connected by the invisible strings of the Taylorverse.
We screamed and whooped and when Taylor told us we were the wildest and the best audience, we know she meant it. We knew it was true.
There were no dud moments. No eras or songs or sequences that could justify taking a toilet break. In contrast, there were too many highlights to include but for this Swiftie: the sight and sound of Taylor in a floaty dress, just her and a guitar, singing the 10-minute version of All Too Well, as autumn leaves literally and metaphorically fell like pieces into place, was sublime. I don’t mind admitting it brought me to tears.
The truth is every minute of this spectacular concert was magical. Connection. Emotion. Theatre. Storytelling. Fun. Celebration. Nobody does it better than Taylor Swift. We were wonderstruck all the way home after a night we’ll never forget. Like, ever.
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