Ten years ago was a different time.The internet was generally nicer, unless your parents had bought you a music video for your 13th birthday and it had gone viral. I was living in Canterbury, in a long distance relationship with a girl from Germany who was living in London, and I was working at BT. Working hard, in fact, because I was working ten hours days, six days a week, to assist with the roll out of a new system, and had been since mid-February. This was the final week of the launch and I needed a break. I was physically and mentally drained and needed live music as a carrot to get me over the line, to take my mind off work.
I had been idly browsing the ticket sites since I realised how gruelling this work would be and found something promising. A gig on Wednesday 30th - I had an early start that day, so would be able to make it to London in time, plus a later start on the day after so I could sleep in if I got back late. It was at the O2 Arena - the right side of London, and I could ride up rather than faff about with trains. It was only an hour’s ride (or an hour and a half if I stuck to the speed limit!). Tickets were £38 for a seat up in the Gods level with the stage, but I’d dropped a similar amount on other gigs before. The only surprise was the artist.
Taylor Swift was, at the time, a country star dabbling in pop music. To 2011 James the former was more important than the latter - being raised on a healthy diet of The Eagles, among other country-adjacent artists, I was more interested in the twang of a steel stringed guitar than the bounce of a pop hook. I had left pop music behind as a teen, after all, the idea of liking a female pop singer was naive and foolish! (I missed out on some excellent Kylie gigs, among others, before realising my error.) Still, I’d enjoyed another pop album in Teenage Dream the year before, I could cope with some mild ribbing and threats to my masculinity.
Still, just to make absolutely sure people knew I was a man’s man, no homo, totally straight, I delayed my spring shearing until after the gig, and rode up still rocking my shaggy hair and winter beard. As well as my leather jacket covered in patches showing my love of classic rock bands - not completely a fashion choice, I’d also be riding home late on a March night and this jacket was warm - I wore what was to become my standard pop gig uniform of a Rammstein t-shirt. I polished off a pre-gig Nandos (I’ll say this for the O2, it doesn’t lack for food options - a lot easier than having a BBQ outside Brixton Academy) and took my place in Block 402, row G - pretty much slap bang in the centre of the block. As I sat down I felt uncomfortably out of place - my attempts at a counter-cultural appearance coming home to roost - and shrunk down in my seat, trying desperately hard to fit in.
(My Rammstein t-shirt choices have paid off at subsequent pop gigs - the door staff at Brixton never asking to check my ticket at Sigrid/Camila Cabello more than once as “literally nobody else at this gig is wearing a Rammstein t-shirt” - and the flip side of wearing a Carly Rae Jepsen shirt to see Rammstein making somebody’s day! But combined with a biker jacket and my approach to hair/beard styling being to grow it until I got bored, it was not the best look.)
The pre-show playlist teased a theme of “acts I’d seen at the O2 previously” by playing BOB’s Airplanes, featuring Hayley Williams, but sadly wasn’t followed up by any of Metallica, The Eagles or Avril Lavigne. I busied myself on my phone, killing time until the headliner came on at a surprisingly early 8:30pm - nowadays that sort of start for the main act is wonderful, as it signifies either a long set (or even better, an early night) but at that time, just a baffling time. Comments that it led to an early finish so that her fanbase can get home before their bedtimes were unnecessarily snarky and probably accurate.
Comparing the setlist to that of the tour DVD she later released, we got a shorter set - only 13 (ha!) songs to the eighteen she performed in the US. I didn't care. After a rollicking first half (standouts being The Story Of Us and the now-memory-holed Better Than Revenge - the two faster tracks), by the time Taylor had made her way to the B-stage with an acoustic guitar and was strumming her way through her second album's title track, I was so overcome with feelings I was an accidental thumb-press on "Send" from tweeting a proposal to my then-girlfriend. As someone who tended to suppress any showing of emotions, both publicly or privately, this was uncharacteristically passionate for me and probably would not have had the desired outcome. Instead, in a twist that would be great foreshadowing if done on a TV show, that was the first song we heard as a married couple just under five years later!
Not even the interminable Dear John could put a dampener on things, as the set closed with the two BIG songs from the tail end of the album, in Enchanted and Long Live. A brief encore of Love Story and we were making our way out, past shuttered restaurants, into the cold night air. None of the merch on offer was nice enough to tempt me - for the best, as I picked up a tour shirt in an online sale for $10 a few years later. A swift ride home (let me have that one) and I was opening the garage to put my bike away at the same time that I would normally be queuing up to get food for the hour long train ride home. I had a couple more long shifts ahead of me, but I felt like I could cope with them now. I was a Swiftie - I just wasn't capable of admitting it to myself yet!
As soon as tickets for her next London gig went on sale, I was there to buy them. That gig wouldn't be for nearly three years after this one, and in that time I'd not only openly admitted to being a Taylor Swift fan, I'd roped in several others to come with me as well. The three of them expressed some cold feet in the week leading up to the gig, and were surprised that I was again happy to go on my own, certain that I'd have a great time! (And I was right, too - despite a shambling idiot appearing on stage nearly spoiling it, and after Ed Sheeran's cameo there was a stage invader as well.) In terms of performance, it may not make my top ten gigs of all time, but in terms of importance to me, my first Taylor gig is one of the top three.
