Taylor Swift is in London. Even the least culturally aware person could not fail to notice this. The city is teeming with people in Eras merchandise, and social media is full of concert footage from tour dates at Wembley Stadium: Travis Kelce wearing a top hat and tailcoat to perform own stage debut, Prince William celebrating his 42nd birthday.sd birthday by shaking it in his private dressing room. We currently have an election here, so the candidates are busy doing things in public to appear as normal as possible. Opposition leader Keir Starmer posted a photo of himself on Friday during what he described as a “Swift campaign pit stop” on the “Eras” tour. Mayor Sadiq Khan released a version of the London Underground map with all the stops replaced by Taylor Swift song titles and captioned it “London (Taylor version)”. For better or worse, it’s effectively like she’s in her city for a weekend.
But one specific location in London is an interesting petri dish in which to examine the Taylor Swift effect. Before April this year, the Black Dog pub, located in the Vauxhall area of south London, was an unremarkable place. I live nearby and have been there once or twice before. It’s a local restaurant that has decent food and serves beer, in other words, just a pub. However, after the release of Swift The Department of Tortured Poets, the establishment finds itself catapulted towards international recognition. The extended, Anthology The album edition contains a song called “The Black Dog”, in which Swift, as narrator, describes realizing that a lover – presumably one of the two London boyfriends most of the album is about album – had forgotten to deactivate location sharing, and she then discovers that he is cheating on her by following him to a bar of the same name.
I popped down last weekend to see if there would be any Swifties at the pub before or after their ‘Eras’ experience and, if so, to ask them to explain. Walking there on Saturday at 3 p.m., I sort of expected to be disappointed. Why would Londoners, for a weekend, some of whom come from as far away as the United States, spend some of their precious time in a bog-standard pub in a part of the city on the outskirts of the city? away from tourist trails? Surely they had better places to be? It was just a bonus track, after all.
I needn’t have worried. The Black Dog was teeming with groups of friends with “Eras” tote bags; mothers and their teenage daughters in “Eras” T-shirts; beleaguered boyfriends taking pictures of their girlfriends, all their arms adorned with strips of letters spelling out their favorite albums, songs and lyrics. On the grass outside the pub there were even a handful of girls putting on other friendship bracelets. Inside, there were even more people and anyone hoping to get a table without a reservation was deluding themselves.
The pub now sells merchandise: pink Black Dog baseball caps, pint glasses embossed with the establishment’s logo and, of course, friendship bracelets. Taylor Swift is playing on the speakers. According to a staff member wearing a Black Dog friendship bracelet, he’s been busy not only all weekend but all month. Swift fans attending the tour elsewhere on the continent have incorporated the concert into a larger trip, stopping in London for their own European tour. There was a somewhat harassed-looking security guard in an orange cap outside, yelling at Swifties to stay away from cars while they had their picture taken with a sign with the lyrics “And so I watch you walk into a bar called the Black Dog. The guard himself wore a sleeve full of beads that fans had given him, including a bracelet that read “Go Chiefs”, a phrase which makes no sense to most Londoners As I stood there, three South African women from the ‘Eras’ merch were debating which one of theirs to give him ‘King of my Heart’. said one. “It will match his hat.”
I spoke to Michelle and Tammi, sisters based in Tennessee and Florida, who were there with their daughters. They were in London to see Swift the following night and would be there until Tuesday. Maya, one of the girls, said “The Black Dog” was her favorite song, so it was the only thing she wanted to do in town other than see the concert. They also went to the stadium that evening, to listen from outside.
This type of tourism seems relatively new, at least in Europe. This also happened on Beyoncé’s tour: crowds of concertgoers went to European cities they weren’t very interested in, like those who came especially for the Stockholm show that kicked off of the “Renaissance” tour. But this seems to be another level in terms of numbers. This summer, 700,000 people are expected to attend the ‘Eras’ tour over eight dates in London, this month and again in August. A large part of this audience will come from abroad. Tickets for the European leg of the “Eras” tour are significantly cheaper than in the United States, to the extent that many have done the math and realized that it would be more profitable to buy “Eras” tickets in Europe and fly over the country. for the concert. The Greater London Authority estimates the tour will generate £300 million for the economy, and last week the European Central Bank’s chief economist was heard reflecting on the megastar’s potential effect on inflation. Swift-themed events last weekend included a Taylor Swift drag brunch; Taylor Swift mini golf and cocktails; a Taylor Swift bar bus tour of London; and an adult ball pit experience with music by Taylor Swift, as well as warm-up parties and after-parties for each concert. I can’t remember another occasion when a person’s presence in a city has triggered such a huge reaction of incidental events and cash-in attempts. It’s no exaggeration that everyone from CNBC to the New York Times is talking about her not just as a pop star, but as an entire economy.
Three women from Ottawa told me they thought about coming to the Black Dog during their weekend in London, but postponed it until that day because Swift sang “The Black Dog.” the night before, as one of two surprises. songs she performs on every tour date. I sat on a bench outside the pub with a group of fans, some from the States and some from London, who had met there that day. They had all seen the show the day before. “Tortured poets is my favorite album,” Lily, a woman in her mid-20s, told me, “and we were like, ‘We have to pay the Black Dog a visit. Just seeing that that’s where she wrote is crazy. I almost imagine that this is the atmosphere of Tortured poets, you know what I mean? It’s like the album in real life.
Two other Swifties, Rachel and Ashley, discovered at 11 a.m. Thursday in New York that they were no longer on the waiting list for tickets to London. “We bought the tickets and got here that evening. We were at the airport at 4 p.m.,” Rachel said. They got married last month. “Now we’re like, I don’t know: We thought we had the best night of our lives? And then last night happened. They wanted to come see the Black Dog because they found the song relevant. “She was stalking her boyfriend, and it’s the most human thing. I always look at my Find My Friends like, Where is everyone, what are they doing?»
Another group, friends from London, were sitting on the lawn with their pints. “I suggested the Black Dog to these two,” Zoe said, gesturing to the other women with her, “and they said, ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I thought, “This is where Taylor was cheated on. This is a big deal for us!” She wasn’t at all surprised that it was busy. to be honest.”
I guess for all those fans, coming to the Black Dog is a way to (let’s be real) get Instagram photos, but also to feel just a little bit closer to Swift. And his fame is so astronomical that such feelings can be aroused simply by a beer drunk from a plastic cup on some grass outside a run-of-the-mill drunk.
When the “Eras” tour comes to a city, it creates this strange feeling of us – the ordinary locals – and them, the Swifties of the world. As I stood in front of the Black Dog, a group walked by.
“It’s crazy that there are so many people and they have so many bags,” one of the girls said to the others. One of her friends replied: “Imagine being the landlady of this pub. They probably hate it.
Apparently this is not the case. Around the time the song was released and the pub began attracting Swiftie visitors, the pub’s events manager, Lily Bottomley, told the BBC that the attention had been “pretty overwhelming” but that the bar “couldn’t be happier,” which to him probably meant at least in part: “We’re making a lot of money.”
People eat on…
Gn entert
News Source : slate.com
