Where in the world can you go to get away from Taylor Swift? She’s in the newspaper columns; in every playlist and on every radio station. At the Super Bowl, America’s biggest and grandest sporting pageant, the cameras seemed more interested in her than the players. You could flee to Antarctica and you’d probably wind up sharing a cabin with a research scientist who has Evermore lyrics tattooed on their arm.
The one place you can go, it turns out, is a field in Somerset in the last week of June. Glastonbury festival has announced its lineup for this year: Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA will headline, and country star Shania Twain will take the Sunday afternoon “legend slot”. Nowhere on the bill is a certain Pennsylvania-born, country-turned-pop superstar. This seems a strange omission. Swift is, by an order of magnitude, the biggest musician on earth right now. Glastonbury is probably the world’s most prestigious music festival. Why does it seem they are never, ever, getting together?
In 2020, they nearly did. Swift was lined up to headline Glastonbury along with Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lamar. That year’s festival was cancelled for obvious, global pandemic-related reasons, as was the next year’s. When Glastonbury returned in 2022, Kendrick and Macca claimed their 24-months-delayed offers – but the third was taken by Billie Eilish instead. Swift reportedly “politely declined” the slot as she was focused on re-recording her old albums.
All was not lost. “I think we’ve got Taylor on board next time she’s doing some touring,” Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis told Variety that year. Well, Swift is doing some touring this year – a little thing called the Eras Tour – and on Glasto weekend, she’s only a short PJ ride away, in Dublin. This raised fevered hopes that she was all set for the Pyramid stage, until the announcement of an additional Dublin show on Sunday 30th June conclusively ruled her out.
“It helps us bond in ways that I don't think I ever had with my parents”
What happened between 2022 and now to make Swift turn Glastonbury down? She may simply have become too big for it. From 2020 to 2023, Swift has released (or re-released) seven albums – one or two a year, every year. These have kept her name in the charts and on people’s lips, month after month. She was last year’s best-selling artist worldwide, and her current relationship, with the puppyish American footballer Travis Kelce, has been so high-profile that US conservatives speculate it’s part of an elaborate plot to boost Joe Biden in this year’s presidential election.
The Eras Tour is as epochal as its name suggests. It made a billion dollars last year – a concert tour record – and is predicted to double that with another billion from this year’s dates. The president of Chile personally requested she visit the country on her tour, to no avail; the prime minister of Canada put in the same plea and had better luck. A minor geopolitical incident erupted in south-east Asia after the government of Singapore paid Swift an undisclosed sum to get regional exclusivity for its own Eras concerts. With Swift reportedly making at least $10m per show, in comparison to the £500,000 ceiling for Glasto headliners, there is a good financial incentive to give Worthy Farm as miss.
But Glastonbury has never really been about money. It’s about status. To headline the festival is to join an exclusive club – a club that some want to restrict entry to. Before Jay-Z played in 2008, Noel Gallagher complained that rappers didn’t deserve the honour, so Hov strolled out onto the Pyramid Stage to begin his set with a mocking cover of “Wonderwall”. More than 100,000 people signed a petition against Kanye West headlining Glastonbury in 2015, where he delivered an intense, exhilarating performance seemingly designed to silence these critics. Some headline choices make stars as much as confirm them. Arctic Monkeys first headlined in 2007, barely months after their second album came out. Stormzy headlined in 2019, when he had only released one album.
Swift doesn’t seem to care about this big bauble. Perhaps it’s because there’s no-one huge enough to share top billing with her. Glastonbury headliners generally divide into heritage acts (Elton John, Paul McCartney), those at cruising altitude in their mid-to-late career (Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar) and those on the come-up (Dua Lipa, SZA). Top-of-their-game megastars are absent, perhaps because, aside from Swift, our culture is too fragmented to produce them anymore.
The Glasto bauble is also not as big as it used to be. The festival market is so saturated that the biggest festival of all has inevitably lost a little glamour. And with pop music an increasingly global affair, dominated by K-pop groups (one of which, Seventeen, is on the Glastonbury line-up this year) and Spanish-language singers, the importance of a 54-year-old shindig in little old England is waning. The increasing interest in the legend slot seems to point to the future: Glastonbury, or at least its main acts, being a nostalgia affair. So maybe in a couple decades’ time, Swift will finally play Glastonbury – not in the evening, but on a sunny (or rainy) Sunday afternoon.