Taylor Swift breaks down in tears minutes before taking to the stage in London as she struggles with the emotional impact of meeting the families of the Southport knife attack victims in heartbreaking scenes from her new Disney series.
The long-awaited six-part docuseries, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, gives fans a rare insight into 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.
The Cruel Summer singer said she has no choice but to put on a brave face. ‘From a mental standpoint I just do live in a reality that is very unreal a lot of the time,’ she said. ‘But it’s my job to be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform. That’s just the way it’s got to be.’
On July 29, 2024 Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, were killed at a Swift-themed dance class in Southport, which also injured ten others.
Axel Rudakubana, 18, was charged with three counts of murder and ten 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 talks 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 compared herself to a pilot flying a plane through turbulence as she revealed her desperate need to protect them from what’s really going on for her behind the scenes so that they have the night of their lives at her show.
‘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.
Should celebrities like Taylor Swift be expected to meet with victims’ families before major shows, or does this place too much emotional burden on them?
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‘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 return to stage in the wake of 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, 34, about feeling hunted and tracked like an animal amid her romance with Travis Kelce and wanting to escape after the tour.
‘It’s like I just need to do this show, remember the joy of it because I’m a little bit, you know…’ she told Sheeran in a sweet moment between the longtime friends before he joined her on stage.
Clearly mentally exhausted by the toll of the last few months, she said she was desperate to switch off and hide away from the world. ‘I get two months off after this which I need,’ she said. ‘I need more than I’ve ever needed.’
Asked what she had planned, Swift told Sheeran: ‘I’m just going to go somewhere no one can find me. I just don’t want to be tracked like an animal. I’ve felt very hunted lately.’
Giving a rare insight into how she feels about fame, Swift agreed with Sheeran’s suggestion that perhaps ‘people have forgot that you’re a human being amongst all this’.
‘100 per cent, yeah,’ she said.
However, the directors don’t just showcase the distressing moments.
The pair are then seen practicing Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud as Swift plots how to announce her friend’s surprise appearance on stage.
‘I’ll do the first verse and first chorus by myself just to build tension and they’re going to be like “oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Is he, is he, is he” and then after the first chorus I can even stop playing and be like “guys, something is missing from this”.
‘And that’s when they’re going to start screaming their heads off and I’m like “I feel like I can’t do this alone tonight”.’
The show was just what Swift needed to shake her nerves, declaring ‘we’re back’ on wrapping the first Wembley date before flopping, exhausted into a waiting car to take her back to the hotel.
Clearly relieved, she immediately calls Kelce and tells him: ‘It went so great I’m so happy. Baby it’s like the crowd knew I needed a pick me up… I was so happy that I thought I was going to forget how to play guitar and sing.’
The series also sees Swift talk 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 keeps everything hush hush while on tour, going so far as to sing the lyrics of TTPD songs instead of playing the actual recordings.
