Live Review: Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Broods

The streets of Woolloongabba are crowded with sequins, home-made signs and red lipstick this evening as some 42,000-ish people congregate inside Gabba stadium. There are people of all ages here and smiles all around – try imagining the least-footballish crowd with the least-bad reputations possible.

New Zealand electro pop duo Broods are responsible for warming the audience up for tonight’s proceedings. Lead singer Georgia Nott seems to take this duty seriously, and literally, as she relentlessly paces back and forth across the stage in a peach outfit with fluffy lining and a pair of black boots. Her voice possesses the airy and husky qualities that are très fashionable and prove hard to describe without using the word ‘ethereal’. However, there’s nothing heavenly about Broods’ music unless you enjoy the idea of spending eternity soaking in the same set of amplified moods that the group currently explore.

Self-described '90s bitch and rising English pop star Charli XCX is immediately more engaging, rising from beneath the stage floor in a white denim outfit with sneakers to delivers a set of back-to-back dancefloor bangers. She presents an almost-chronologically ordered selection of her older songs, Boom Clap, I Love It, and Break The Rules, before expressing her desire to rewind the clock even further with her current hit, 1999. After thanking Broods, Swift, and the many women involved in tonight’s performances, it seems as if the time is perfect for her recent single Girls Night Out – alas, no such luck, although we are treated to her paean to the male gender, simply titled Boys. By the time she’s finishing her set with Fancy, the song that was both her and Iggy Azalea’s rise to fame, it’s clear that she is a songwriter and performer with the potential for a long career ahead of her.

In contrast, Taylor Swift is already so famous that her most recent album is explicitly focused on her experiences with fame. Before we actually see her on stage, there’s a series of behind-the-scenes videos and even a trivia question (“In the Look What You Made Me Do video, which of the two Taylors fight?”) that create anticipation and reinforce the theme; Joan Jett’s Bad Reputation plays at one point.

Soon, the two giant (apparently 33 metres tall) screens behind the stage split to reveal Swift’s silhouette, poised and, well …Ready For It. This is the 50th performance of her biggest tour yet, and she is intensely committed to her role this evening, with every facial expression throughout the first half of the set feeling scripted.

In fact, every aspect of the show exhibits this same meticulous attention to detail, to the extent that it sometimes feels as if we’re watching a lyric video; almost every image from each song is represented in the stage production (flames for “I can feel the flames on my skin”,  tilted stage for “don’t like your tilted stage”, and the snakes… we’ll get to the snakes later).

Swift leans heavily into her Reputation material, with I Did Something Bad and Gorgeous rounding out an early trilogy of Reputation tracks before Swift breaks things up with some older songs – we finally get a glimpse of her full band as three guitarists strum away during a medley of Style, Love Story, and You Belong With Me. 

More Reputation tracks follow before Swift swiftly alights a giant bird’s nest (maybe?) during Delicate, making her way to a small, secondary stage in the centre of the stadium so that she can hold a mini dance-party with Nott and Charli XCX during Shake It Off. It’s at this stage that the snakes that previously appeared during Look What You Made Me Do rear their ugly heads again, only this time the snakes seem less menacing, and more like they are… dancing? Which makes Swift… a snake charmer? Does this have anything to do with the Blank Space lyrics she’s singing about making “the bad guys good for a weekend”? There’s a lot of metaphors here.

Stripping things down with a solo performance of Dancing With Our Hands Tied and fan-favourite Starlight, it’s not long before Swift is singing about actually stripping down: “only bought this dress so you could take it off”. Dress is one of the highlights of the night, due in no small part to the work of the dancers performing on the main stage, clad in outfits billowing with excess fabric that ripples through the air, like butterflies dancing in slow motion.

Swift makes her way back to the main stage riding a giant snake-skeleton while performing a very Zepplin-esque version of Bad Blood (the synths are pure Kashmir) before she delivers another salvo of Reputation songs interspersed with a short film and poetry interlude, as well as two final fan favourites, Long Live and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, and many fireworks.

While singing all night about the trials and tribulations of fame and having a big reputation, something fascinating has been happening: even Swift’s songs about relationships now feel like they’re addressing her celebrity, so that when she sings “I love the players and you love the game” during Blank Space, it’s not hard to imagine that we are the players she is singing about, because everyone here certainly seems to love the game.