Playing Cluedo, I realise I’ve cracked. There’s something about my Miss Scarlett card – that glint in her eyes, the knowing smile. Or maybe this is what happens when you have spent an entire month on an impossible mission to avoid the planet’s biggest pop star. You see, hear, simply sense Taylor Swift everywhere.
For the month of May, with Taylormania raging as Swift’s Eras tour headed to the UK, I was assigned a sort of inverted Where’s Wally? quest. Is it possible to shield yourself from the daily blanket coverage of a ubiquitous superstar who is one of the most photographed people in the world, had more than 26bn streams on Spotify last year, whose tour is blazing through five continents and has become a record-breaking movie, and who also just happened to drop a new album?
My first thought is, why on earth would you want to attempt to spend a month Swift-free? I’ve barely had a chance to properly listen to The Tortured Poets Department yet and was all set to stream the Eras film with my daughters (we couldn’t get concert tickets). But I gamely accept the challenge. First things first: I resolve to stay off Spotify, swerve the Guardian’s music desk whenever possible and unsubscribe from our Swift Notes newsletter.
I’ve been signed up for this experiment because I have two daughters. My eldest, 14-year-old Aggie, is listening to a lot of TV Girl and Laufey these days, but I decide to stay out of her bedroom just in case (she brought home a Swift poster from seeing the Eras film in the cinema a while ago). My younger daughter, Hilda, 10, is a wildlife lover so her walls are more likely to have actual swifts on them. I consider acquiring noise-cancelling headphones for the month, purely out of journalistic duty and not at all because Aggie has a new electric guitar (mostly used for Arctic Monkeys riffs so far but there’s a Swift guitar tabs book somewhere around here).
I kick off the month successfully by spending an entire day without Tay-Tay. I go to Manchester, but the stations, shops and cafes I pass through are all Swift-free zones. Lucky I’m not in rival city Liverpool, which has been rechristened Taylor Town and unveiled a series of art installations for each of her eras, as Anfield stadium hosts 50,000 fans for each night of her three sold-out Eras gigs. A council taskforce has spent nine months planning for her arrival.
Back in London, a double-whammy on 2 May is the first sign that my Swift-free diet is doomed. Relatives in Australia send a set of glittery selfies from the Sydney Eras concert. Spookily, when I check my email, there’s TS herself, with spangly couture bodysuit and guitar, in a pop-up ad for the concert film on Disney+. Then the next night, on the tube, I see a huge ad for The Tortured Poets Department featuring the more pensive black-and-white cover portrait by Beth Garrabrant, who has become Swift’s go-to photographer.
I don’t actually hear any of Swift’s music until a couple of days later when Aggie wanders through the lounge trilling “You belong with me-ee-ee!” She later emerges from doing her maths homework and says she’s listened to both the Folklore and Evermore albums back to back (they’re perfect to study to, apparently). As we’re already talking about Taylor, I ask which is her favourite album. “I like 1989,” she replies. “That was the first album I ever listened to by anyone – on my iPod,” she adds, delighted with this apparently super-retro detail from life before her smartphone. “Now, it’s Folklore. I really like depressing music.” She’s also a big fan of the 10-minute version of All Too Well; in class one day, with half an hour to go until the end of a lesson, she reasoned that at least it only equated to three plays of that song.
Like many parents and their children, I’ve seen my girls grow through eras along with Taylor. There was a time, years ago, when 1989 and Red were constantly playing in our flat. We’d take turns to choose the next song. Hilda’s was always 22, with my favourite ever misheard lyric: “It feels like a perfect night / To dress up like hamsters!” At that time you couldn’t go to a children’s party without hearing Shake It Off and we’d watch Rosita and Gunter giving the song “major piggy power” in the showstopper scene from the brilliant animated film Sing. The video for Me! was practically a compendium of the girls’ favourite things: kittens, unicorns, rainbow slime.
Those memories are fresh enough for it to be doubly affecting to hear both Swift and Aggie sing a line like “when you are young they assume you know nothing” from Cardigan. Aggie now mostly listens to indie records, but Cardigan pops up on her shared playlist for a road trip she is planning with her friends, along with Swift tunes past and present including Enchanted, August and (nice touch) Getaway Car. Aggie’s mates don’t seem enamoured with Swift’s new album, though – one of them will be seeing the Eras tour live and is gutted that older songs are being dropped for tracks from it.
Hilda, whose controversial choice for favourite Swift song is Macavity from the critically mauled film Cats, says no one in her class really loves Taylor – they are all singing Miley Cyrus’s Flowers instead. Are the teachers her school’s proper Swifties? “Definitely.” Hilda reports no Taylor friendship bracelets among her group. Picking her up one day from school, I scan the playground for any of the pop star’s merch but see nothing. All month, I see more T-shirts blazoned with Louis Theroux’s face than Swift’s.
But she still pops up in some surprising places, not least the house of God. Walking through Covent Garden one night, I spy a poster for a string quartet’s Taylor Swift tribute by candlelight in the Actors’ Church. Killing time in Victoria station one afternoon, I drift into a place called Duck Depot whose expansive range of novelty rubber ducks include – argh, too late I’ve seen it – one called Tail-rrr wearing a hat, heart-shaped glasses and a “Splash it off!” T-shirt. (It’s next to one with a Jagger-esque beak called Jumpin’ Quack Splash.) Looking for a birthday card in another shop, I find an illustrated Swift gazing out from a cover on the shelves: “Here’s to a new era!”
Swift’s awareness of her own eras, and how they sit alongside personal chapters in her fans’ lives, is an integral part of her success. To learn more about her rise to omnipresence, I consult Georgia Carroll, a fan culture expert with a PhD in sociology whose research has explored what motivates fans to spend money on their favourite celebrities. Earlier this year Carroll gave a keynote address at the University of Melbourne’s Swiftposium, a two-day academic conference studying Swift; a similar event will take place in Liverpool during the tour.
“I’m just under five years younger than Taylor,” says Carroll, who recently turned 30. “I was 14 when I became a fan. People around my age, we feel like we grew up with her in real time. The first album I became a fan of was Fearless. And it had songs like Fifteen, which is about high school, crushes and everything. A lot of fans I spoke to for my research said she felt like a cool best friend or a slightly older sister who was offering you advice and making you feel less alone.”
The autobiographical element of Swift’s songs mean “she has taken us on the journey with her” says Carroll, and is “basically writing a diary in public for us”. And as with any good diary, you want to keep reading. “You have 16-year-old Taylor’s diary, 18-year-old Taylor, all the way up to 34-year-old Taylor. That is also a period of time that’s so fundamental to how you develop your own identity.” Not all pop stars offer the same experience. “I love my boybands,” says Carroll, but their music “doesn’t take you on that journey. You know, I love Harry Styles. His concerts are amazing – they kind of rival the Eras tour in terms of fans dressing up and having a good time. But he’s just singing bops. They’re not cutting you deep like: wow, yes, I have felt that too, Harry!”
Back to my daily Taylor count. As the Guardian’s stage editor, I’m at the theatre a lot but I think they’ll be safe to visit – in 10 years I’ve hardly ever heard Swift’s music used on stage. She doesn’t even feature in & Juliet, Swedish banger-songwriter Max Martin’s ridiculously enjoyable jukebox spin on Romeo and Juliet, which somehow never found a space for Bad Blood or New Romantics, both of which he co-wrote for Swift.
So when I go to see the West End’s Tina Turner musical (third time!), I’m convinced there’s no risk – but even the Queen of Rock’n’Roll gets ambushed by the pop titan. It’s my fault: I’ve missed dinner so in the interval nip into the Co-op around the corner for something to eat and immediately hear: “Weee! Are! Never! Ever! Ever! … Getting back together!” It’s the first time in days that I’ve heard Swift herself singing (as opposed to teenage caterwauling at home and the time I caught myself humming Fortnight). Weirdly, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together is – as far as I can remember – the only Swift song I have ever actually heard used in a theatre production, for a scene shared by Portia and her pals in a Las Vegas-set version of The Merchant of Venice at the Almeida. Swift dubbed the new Tortured Poets section on her Eras tour “Female Rage: The Musical”, then filed to trademark that name, so her own jukebox musical may not be too far away.
Unlike other musicians, who disappear for a bit to make a record and then reappear for a flurry of activity, Swift just seems to be constantly “on”. The pandemic was a turning point for her, says Carroll. When she started out, there used to be a fairly regular cycle with two years between albums. “You could almost set your clock by her and it was like, OK, new album, new era, she’ll do her tour. But this was pre-TikTok, before Instagram.” Swift followed her 2019 album Lover with the surprise release Folklore just under a year later, and then Evermore five months after that. “So it was three albums in under 18 months, which is a crazy amount of content. And it kind of never slowed down because of all the ‘Taylor’s versions’ [re-recordings of Swift’s earlier albums]. So between 2019 and The Tortured Poets Department, she did” – Carroll pauses to add them all up – “that’s, like, nine albums in five years! Who does that? She broke the two-year cycle and has vomited content since then.”
For a few Taylor-free days later in the month, I forget that Swift exists. Then, nodding off on a late train back to London one night, I’m woken by a couple of passengers behind me talking about her song Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? and the line about how she’ll sue you if you step on her lawn. “She was patrolling her lawn with a water pistol,” says one, describing the viral photo it refers to. I feel duty bound to move away from the conversation but, lost in Swift talk, they get off at the next station.
Might Taylor step off any time soon? Carroll doubts it. “Obviously the Eras tour is going on for most of this year. Then she’s still got two rereleases to do. But at that point, you’ve got to ask yourself, isn’t she tired? I’m tired just thinking about it!” The other week, Carroll hit the gym and watched the Eras tour while exercising, thinking it might give her an energy boost. “And all I could think of was the fact that she trained for the tour by singing all of the songs while running on the treadmill for hours on end. She must be just made of something different.”
Back at home, I have my own workout with Aggie and Hilda as we perfect our moves for dance game Just Dance. But after the horse-riding strut for Psy’s Gangnam Style, the cossack kicks for Boney M’s Rasputin and keeping up with the Stetson-wearing panda on Pitbull’s Timber, they lose interest when a fan-made mashup of Shake It Off comes on. They humour me, watching with more than a hint of horror, as I refuse to stop. Finally they can stand it no more and reach for the remote – this time it’s the pair of them quashing Taylor, not me.
Dancing on my own, it dawns on me that a month without TS has been a crueller start to summer for me than the task would ever be for them. But finally here’s June, and I’m free to dive back into The Tortured Poets Department – and into the UK’s crashing wave of Taylormania.