“The Grammy winner, 36, is seen sobbing in the glittering orange outfit she wore to open the shows last August as she walks from the meeting to a private room where she breaks down.”, — write: www.dailymail.co.uk
The long-awaited six-part docuseries, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, takes fans behind the scenes of the mammoth tour and sees the singer crying alongside her mom, Andrea Swift, as she struggles to compose herself before stepping out to thousands of fans at Wembley Stadium.
The Grammy winner, 36, is seen sobbing in the glittering orange outfit she wore to open the shows last August as she walks from the meeting to a private room where she breaks down.
‘I know you helped them,’ Andrea says as she passes her daughter a tissue. ‘I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I know you helped them.’
Swift struggles to catch her breath as she wipes her eyes and tries to pull herself together before she is seen being wheeled to the stage with little time to process the emotional meeting.
On July 29, 2024 Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, were killed at a Swift-themed dance class in Southport, which also injured 10 others.
Axel Rudakubana, 18, was charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder.
The singer met privately with the families before each of her five shows at Wembley Stadium.
The gigs marked Swift’s first time performing in the UK since the tragedy, and saw her welcome 92,000 fans to the final European leg of The Era’s Tour.
In an Instagram message following the horrific incident, Swift said: ‘The horror of yesterday’s attack in Southport is washing over me continuously, and I’m just completely in shock.’
Earlier in the documentary she talked about her upset and her struggle to perform for the three and a half hours despite the devastating memories and the pressure she faces.
Swift explained she doesn’t want to worry her devoted fans, and compared herself to a pilot flying a plane.
‘There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift themed dance party and it was little kids that…’ she said in a piece to camera, trailing off as she fought back tears.
‘I’ll meet some of these families tonight at a pop concert you know,’ she continued. ‘It’s going to be fine because when I meet them I’m not going to do this I swear to God. I’m going to be smiley. So any of this gets out of the way before you ever go on stage. You lock it off. Three and a half hours. They don’t have to worry about you.
‘It’s like a pilot flying a plane and you’re like “ah there’s turbulence up ahead I don’t know if we’re going to land in Dallas. I’m going to try hard but I don’t know if I can figure out how to land in this turbulence”. Everyone on the plane is going to freak out.
‘You just have to have a calm cool collected tone of like “we will be landing in Dallas at 6:05pm got a little turbulence up ahead but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before just keep your seatbelt fastened and welcome to the Eras Tour”.’
Her Wembley dates were extra heavy as they also marked her first return to stage since the foiled Vienna terrorist plot which forced her to cancel three dates back in August 2024.
‘We dodged a massacre situation,’ she said before attempting to soothe herself with an audiobook backstage.
‘I’m trying to calm down I’m having a very physical reaction to my nerves. My hands are shaking. It’s weird I just have to get this first show over with,’ she told her mom who revealed she was also feeling ‘twitchy’ and struggling to relax.
‘I’ve been performing for 20 years,’ Swift says. ‘From a mental standpoint being afraid that something is going to happen to your fans at any moment – this a new challenge.
‘I want to keep all of the nerves I have away from the crowd because when you’re the ring leader of this show they can sense any sort of shift energetically in you and you have to really focus on that and factor that in.
‘You’re at the Eras Tour – nothing’s wrong.’
While the documentary is uplifting at heart, it is at times a tearjerker, and shows Swift’s stress behind-the-scenes.
The Lover songstress talks to her good friend and collaborator Ed Sheeran about feeling hunted and tracked like an animal’ amid her romance with Travis Kelce and wanting to escape after the tour.
However, the directors don’t just showcase just the distressing moments. Swift talks about her love of mystery while keeping her recording of The Tortured Poets Department Secret, saying, ‘I love having a good secret.’
The Mastermind hitmaker even reveals how she everything confidential while on tour, going so far as to sing the lyrics of TTPD songs instead of playing the actual recordings.