Taylor Swift bid farewell to London with the first live performance of her song “So Long, London”, from her latest hit album The Tortured Poets Department.
The US pop star concluded the UK and European run of her record-breaking Eras Tour with her eighth concert at Wembley Stadium on Tuesday (20 August).
Fans had been speculating whether she would perform the track, which is widely believed to be about the end of her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, whom she split from last year.
Lyrics include the lines: “I left all I knew, you left me at the house by the Heath/ I stopped CPR, after all it’s no use/ The spirit was gone, we would never come to/ And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”
Swift, 34, and Alwyn, 33, dated for six years from 2016 to early 2023.
The former couple were rumoured to have hunkered down at a rented home in Primrose Hill during coronavirus lockdowns, while Swift is said to have enjoyed walks on Hampstead Heath during her visits to the UK.
Elsewhere during her final Wembley show, Swift brought out Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine for a surprise first-time performance of their collaborative track “Florida.” She was later joined on stage by her co-producer Jack Antonoff for a duet of “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and “Getaway Car.”
At an earlier London show on Friday 16 August, she shocked and delighted fans with a rendition of her song “London Boy”, believed to have been written about Alwyn during happier times.
The song from her 2017 album Lover details how Swift was introduced by Alwyn to some of her favourite spots in the capital, from strolls around Camden Market to nights in Brixton and pints in Soho.
“I’ve never played this on the Eras Tour before,” Swift told her 92,000-strong crowd, before beginning the track.
Alwyn addressed his split from Swift publicly for the first time in a recent interview with The Sunday Times’s Style Magazine, in which he hoped people would be able to “emphathise” with their situation.
“I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathise and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years,” he said. “That is a hard thing to navigate.”
He continued: “What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in.
“So you have something very real suddenly thrown into a very unreal space: tabloids, social media, press, where it is then dissected, speculated on, pulled out of shape beyond recognition.
“And the truth is, to that last point, there is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”
Following her split from Alwyn, Swift briefly dated The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, assumed to be the subect of a number of songs on The Tortured Poets Department.
She has been in a relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce since September 2023, with the pair supporting each other at his games and Swift’s concerts.
After London, Swift will fly out to perform a string of shows in the US and Canada, including Miami, New Orleans and Indianapolis. Her final Eras concert will take place in Vancouver on 8 December, a week before her 35th birthday.
She disabused fans of the prospect that the Eras tour might continue into 2025 during her 100th performance, in Liverpool in June, as she called the tour the “most exhausting, all-encompassing but most joyful, most rewarding, most wonderful thing that has ever happened in my life”.
Celebrating the 100th show, she said it meant “this is the very first time I’ve ever acknowledged to myself and admitted that this tour is gonna end in December. Like, that’s it.
“And that feels so far away from now,” she continued. “But then again, it feels like we just played our first show on this tour. Because you have made this so much fun for us that we wanted to do a hundred shows, 150-something shows that we have on the whole tour.”
The Tortured Poets Department recently marked its 15th week at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, tying Carole King’s Tapestry for the third-most weeks at No 1 for female artists.
Only Adele and the late Whitney Houston have albums that have claimed more weeks at the top of the charts: Adele with her 2011 album 21, and Houston with her 1992 soundtrack for The Bodyguard.
In a five-star review for The Independent, critic Helen Brown praised Poets as a “terrific reminder of [Swift’s] storytelling powers”.
