Taylor Swift
University Of Phoenix Stadium, Arizona Touring UK, Fri to Jun 23
Outside Phoenix, Arizona, stands a stadium like a giant saucepan, plonked in a field. ‘Build it and they will come,’ I say to my twentysomething Uber driver. She looks at me blankly.
On a sweltering night, the stadium is icily air-conditioned for Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour. There are merchandise stalls everywhere, attracting queues like airport security.
In a crowd of 59,000, most of the seven ages of woman are represented – tots in frocks, tweens in jeans, students in mini-skirts, young professionals in suits, mums linking arms with their daughters. Welcome to pop in 2018: it’s a woman’s woman’s woman’s world.
Amid the life lessons and the eye candy, the music at Taylor Swift’s Arizona gig is incidental. Mostly serviceable dance-pop, it leaves me as cold as the stadium’s air-con
Whoever said ‘you can’t please all the people all the time’ obviously hadn’t come across Taylor Swift.
‘For 14 months,’ she confides, ‘I was following what you guys were saying online. I saw what you were hoping for from this tour and tried to put together a combination of all the things you wanted.’ She’s not a pop star at all. She’s a focus group.
Her researches lead, inevitably, to overkill: dancers, lasers, fireworks, flame-throwers, a flying cage to whisk her to the B-stage.
She merrily borrows ideas – from George Michael (2006) a main stage that’s also a video screen; from Coldplay (2012) a wristband for everyone, flickering to the beat, turning us into fireflies.
Her own stamp takes the form of supersized snakes – a retort to Kim Kardashian, who called Taylor a snake on Twitter.
‘I went through some low times,’ Swift says. ‘Didn’t know if I was gonna do this any more. But I wanted to send a message to you guys that if someone is mean to you on social media, and other people go along with it, it doesn’t have to defeat you. The lesson is you shouldn’t care if you feel misunderstood by people who don’t know you.’
Amid the life lessons and the eye candy, the music is incidental. Mostly serviceable dance-pop, it leaves me as cold as the air-con.
Still, you have to admire Taylor as a phenomenon. Glamorous but relatable, she appeals to the little girl inside the grown woman, and vice versa.
taylorswift.com
ALSO PLAYING
Ed Sheeran
Etihad Stadium, Manchester Touring until Jun 24
Rating: 
When Ed Sheeran played in Manchester in 2009 at a music business conference, he recalls, he performed to a crowd of one.
‘And now I’m playing four nights at the Etihad!’ To misquote Sir Alex Ferguson of Old Trafford: pop music – bloody hell.
Bounding onstage with a sweet, slightly sheepish grin for the first of 18 entirely sold-out dates in British stadiums, he looks as if he still can’t quite believe it all: the billions of streams, the Glastonbury headline slot, the MBE at 26.
Bounding onstage for the first of 18 entirely sold-out UK dates, Ed Sheeran (above) looks as if he still can’t quite believe it all: the billions of streams, the Glastonbury headline slot, the MBE
To prove what a funny world it is, he follows his anecdote with a tune that was in his 2009 set, his debut hit, The A Team.
Why did the music industry’s finest minds scurry off in 2009 rather than listen to a tune about a drug-addicted homeless girl, her face ‘crumbling like pastries’? Why, in fact, are 50,000 people singing along quite so cheerily now?
Sheeran’s live proposition is well known these days: you just get him, a lot of flashing screens, his guitar and custom loops pedal, the Chewie Monsta that lets him briskly layer up songs until they can fill a football ground.
It’s an impressive, energetic routine, when he conjures up charging opener Castle On The Hill, or a funky, masterful Sing. Just as often, though, the material is less striking, the sound a bit too rackety. Theme-pub horror Galway Girl comes and goes without inflicting much pain.
A late run of ballads, including last year’s chart-topper, Perfect, gets everyone’s attention and suddenly we’re at peak smartphone-torch.
For an encore, Shape Of You makes the entire pitch bounce. Outside, a few minutes later, two buskers play it as a duet – presumably not realising that when you do it all by yourself, that’s when the real money starts coming.
Adam Woods
edsheeran.com
THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASES
By Adam Woods
Lily Allen No Shame Parlophone, out Fri
Rating: 
Allen lost herself on album three in pursuit of hits. After a divorce, a stalker and an alcohol problem, she sounds like the Lily of a decade ago – older and more rueful but sharp and honest. She unpacks her issues in gentle electronic and urban settings that suit her voice, getting to the heart of the matter
Roger Daltrey As Long As I Have You Polydor, out now
Rating:
A Daltrey solo record with Pete Townshend on guitar on seven songs is a good thing. At its best, it’s ripping: Daltrey’s burly bellow is bracingly healthy on the heavy R&B of the title track and the Who’s Next-style Stephen Stills cover How Far, and nuanced and impassioned on a stack of deep soul ballads