By the time The Eras Tour rolled into Edinburgh it was already a well-oiled machine, both in reality and in our minds. Taylor Swift and her entourage have been performing this show since March 2023, and we’ve been watching it (first via patchy YouTube clips, then the subsequent film) for just as long. But a lot can happen in 15 months, and the lens through which we view this monumental force of a show now is very different to opening night.

So while the basic structure remains the same (the stunning design, sharp choreography, vocal dexterity, and transformative transitions between albums that find us swaying to ‘Willow’ one minute, flicking our wrists to ‘Shake it Off’ the next), our knowledge of what it took for Swift to put this show together has changed. Ordinarily, it would be wrong to even reference a woman’s romantic life when appraising her art, but Swift’s love affairs and lyrics are so inextricably linked, it’s impossible not to. We know that she and Joe Alwyn wrote ‘Champagne Problems’ together, and that the break-up tore her to pieces, so when she sits at the piano to play it, sans band or back-up, it receives the longest, loudest response of the night.

The arrival of Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department in April not only heralded an incredible new seven-song section in the Eras show, but took us further inside her world. Surely the irony is not lost on anybody in a 73,000-strong audience at Murrayfield that when we sing ‘all the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting “more!”’ along to ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’, that we are the problem as much as the solution. But as the two tracks that announce Swift’s imminent arrival on stage at the start of each show, Lady Gaga’s ‘Applause’ and ‘You Don’t Own Me’ sung by Dusty Springfield, make clear, those two things can co-exist: she wants and needs us, but ‘no, we can’t come to the wedding’.

With a show as highly documented as this, moments that stray from the well-worn path of business as usual are lapped up by the Scottish crowd. When dancer Kameron Saunders, who usually says ‘like, never’ into the mic during ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’, switches it to ‘nae chance’, everyone goes wild. So too when Swift cites the Scottish hills and glens as an inspiration for lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore.

And when she gets a hand cramp during the surprise-songs acoustic set (a mash-up of ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve’ and ‘I Know Places’, followed by ‘’tis the damn season’ and ‘Daylight’), there are whoops of support acknowledging that this well-oiled machine is, in fact, a human being, albeit an unfeasibly talented one. 

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour runs until Sunday 30 June; reviewed at Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh.