It’s one thing to be starstruck by Taylor Swift. It’s another thing for the world’s biggest pop star to be starstruck herself. It happened on night one of her Eras Tour in Melbourne, Australia, and she let the crowd know about it.
The Midnights singer was rendered damn near speechless while performing at Melbourne Cricket Ground, where 96,000 packed the famed venue that first opened its doors in 1853. It’s the largest crowd Swift has ever performed in front of, and she was very much aware about it.
“If I seem a little bit like I’m losing my mind over the fact that there are 96,000 people here tonight … it’s because it’s true,” she told the boisterous crowd, via Deadline. “This is the biggest show that we’ve ever done. I’m fully starstruck by the fact so many people wanted to hang out with us on a Friday night in Melbourne!”
The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia’s oldest (1831) and most-read newspaper in the country, offered a five-star review for Swift’s opening-night performance. The outlet also interviewed fans and parents who chaperoned their kids to the concert, and the parents themselves were gobsmacked at Swift’s unparalleled ability to perform at such high energy throughout the entire night, a notion shared by many in the states.
“I don’t know where she gets her energy from,” a parent of a 12-year-old told the newspaper. “She was amazing. She just kept going for hours.”
45 songs in three and a half hours, to be exact.
Swift previously teased a second cover image for her upcoming The Tortured Poets Department and has announced a new bonus track.
Swift dropped the news during her Eras Tour performance in Melbourne, Australia, on Friday, going live on Instagram to share the moment with her followers around the globe.
The stunning sepia-toned image shows Swift’s face resting on her arms as she lays on a bed, gazing off into the distance. It’s a similar aesthetic to her first Tortured Poets imagery, in which she is sprawled on a bed in black lingerie.
A second close-up image of Swift’s face highlights the phrase, “You don’t get to tell me about sad.”
When she wraps her tour stop in Melbourne, Swift will next be headed to Accor Stadium in Sydney. The four-night event — beginning Feb. 23 — is sold out.
By the way, it’s going to cost nearly $1 million to replace the Melbourne Cricket Ground’s turf after the Eras Tour wraps there. MCG boss Stuart Fox told Australia’s News.com that there’s a massive undertaking before, during and after Swift’s shows.
“It’s just massive. Building the seating plan, we obviously have people on the turf, but it’s really around the stage production — 70 semi-trucks coming onto your ground is quite confronting, and you’ve got six days of set-up, three concerts across Friday, Saturday, Sunday evening, two or three days of pack-down,” Fox said. “Then you’ve got to replace half the turf at a significant cost, and then we’ve got an AFL season three weeks later.”
Hopefully they were ready for it.
