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CULTURE

Taylor Swift fever grips Paris at start of Europe tour

Taylor Swift-fever struck Paris on Thursday as the highest-grossing tour in history finally arrived in Europe, with fans treated to the first-ever performance of songs from her latest album.

Taylor Swift fever grips Paris at start of Europe tour
US singer and songwriter Taylor Swift performs on stage at the Paris La Defense Arena as part of her The Eras Tour, in Nanterre, north-western France, on May 9, 2024. (Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP)

The Eras Tour began its European leg with four dates at the La Defense Arena in Paris and attendance on the first night alone was 45,387, according to her press team.

“I wish I could have toured Europe more. This is a dream crowd,” the 34-year-old megastar told the ecstatic audience.

There were deafening shrieks as images of typewriter sheets indicated that songs off the new album, “The Tortured Poets Department”, were starting late in the show.

Emerging in a lyrics-covered dress, she ran through several of the darker new tracks starting with “But Daddy I Love Him” and including “Fortnight”, a particularly furious rendition of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” and an elaborate “I Can Do it with a Broken Heart” with a golden-era Hollywood dance routine.

“You were the first crowd to see songs from ‘The Tortured Poets Department’,” she said, before adding: “Or, as I like to call it, ‘Female Rage: the Musical'”.

That was a dream come true for many in the audience.

“I’ve been so excited for so long, I can’t believe it’s actually happening,” said 11-year-old Emma, who had flown in with her mother from New York.

The venue said a fifth of the crowd were from the United States — many attracted by Europe’s rules against charging huge mark-ups on resale tickets that can save Americans thousands of dollars compared with shows at home.

Georg’Ann Daly decided to celebrate her 23rd birthday with the Paris show. It meant flying from Nashville to Chicago to London and catching the Eurostar to Paris.

“I’ve always been obsessed with Taylor Swift,” she told AFP.

A handful of superfans camped out from Tuesday in Paris to ensure they got a prime spot.

“I didn’t plan to, but I came to check it out and I saw the first tents and I panicked a little,” said Chris, 30.

Noah, 20, is seeing all four Paris concerts — he used 22 email addresses to get through the lottery system and secure the tickets

Record-breaker

After France, Swift heads on for dates in Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Poland and Austria.

The Eras Tour has already worked its way across North and South America and Asia since starting in March 2023.

By the end of the year, it had already become the first to sell more than $1 billion in tickets and is on track to more than double that by the time it concludes in Vancouver this December.

Swift’s popularity shows no sign of dimming — the new album shifted 1.4 million copies on its first day and broke every streaming record going, reaching a billion streams on Spotify within five days.

Her tell-all dissections of her love stories have been the fuel powering her global domination, and fans have been poring over “The Tortured Poets Department” for cryptic clues about ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, her short-but-dramatic fling with Matty Healy (lead singer of The 1975), and her current partner, American football star Travis Kelce.

“Taylor talks about toxic relationships, impossible love, politics, mental health, and so much more,” said Chris as she waited by her tent for the big moment. “I think we can all find a song that resonates with our experiences.”

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STRIKES

Olympic pay strike to ‘severely disrupt’ Paris public transport on Tuesday

A Tuesday rail strike over bonuses for Paris' July-August Olympic Games period will leave just one in five suburban commuter trains running on some lines in the French capital, operator SNCF have warned.

Olympic pay strike to 'severely disrupt' Paris public transport on Tuesday

Traffic will be “very severely disrupted”, SNCF said, with certain lines suspended outside peak hours.

The operator’s Transilien Paris regional network has urged people to work from home or find alternate transport on Tuesday, which follows a Monday public holiday.

Rail workers’ unions are pressuring SNCF in negotiations over bonuses for working through the Olympic period.

Their counterparts at transport operator RATP, which runs metro and bus services in Paris, have already secured an average 1,000-euro ($1,086) bonus, reaching up to 2,500 euros for the most in-demand train and bus drivers.

“We thought the talks were dragging on a bit and wanted to provoke something,” Fabien Villedieu of the SUD-Rail union told AFP on Friday.

“We have a heavy workload with 4,500 additional trains in August, so a whole range of our colleagues won’t be able to go on holiday,” he added.

Strikes and threats of industrial action during the Games have marked the months leading up to the event, including from rubbish collectors and government and medical workers.

Rubbish collectors this month won a pay rise on top of an Olympic bonus, heading off multiple days of walkouts flagged for later in May and over the period of the Games.

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