The Fandom of Taylor Swift is something that I find so fascinating, particularly the massive surge in popularity in the last 3 or 4 years.
Where Taylor couldn’t sell out Croke Park in 2018 on her Reputations tour, her current Eras tour as we’ve discussed before on the podcast, crashed Ticketmaster and has seen such a huge unprecedented demand that that’s worth exploring why?
With the three Dublin gigs at the Aviva next summer and the Taylor Swift Eras Tour film doing big numbers at the box office, it felt like the right time to dip in.
With Andrea’s absence this week, I thought I’d delve into the lore and fandom of the Swifties through the lens of a community which gather around Taylor once a month.
Swiftogedden is a club night that plays only Taylor songs all night, and was started by Dave Fawbert, a DJ and former journalist who put on his first Swiftogedden in London in 2019, and since then it has grown to a national UK and in the last two years an nationwide Irish event too.
Anna Jacob is a resident DJ at the Irish Swiftogedden club nights, and a pal of mine, and I’ve been fascinated with the success of the single artist only night – as Swifties gather en masse to sold out venues in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Galway and Limerick along with a rake of UK cities to sing their hearts out to Swift classics, new songs, new versions and deep cuts.
Our chat covers fandom becoming a religious like community of like-minded people, why Taylor Swift is the new Mozart, a celebration of the “eras” of girlhood and womanhood, what happens at Swiftogedden nights and why does it work so well and we also read out some passages from this wonderful Taffy Brodesser-Akner New York Times piece on Swiftiedom.
* Support Nialler9 on Patreon, where we share Anna’s Swiftie Skeptics playlist.
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Show notes
- Taffy Brodesser-Akner piece on Swiftiedom [New York Times]
- Inside Dublin’s Swiftogeddon club night [Irish Times]
- Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist
- All 237 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked [Rolling Stone]
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