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The Eras Tour is one hell of a drug — just ask Florence Welch!
The Florence and the Machine singer helped Taylor Swift close out five nights in London in August by joining her to sing their duet “Florida!!!,” a moment that’s revisited in the new docuseries Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour – The End of an Era.
In the series (the first two episodes of which are now streaming on Disney+), Welch, 39, arrives at Wembley Stadium to learn choreography for “Florida!!!,” and finds it all a bit overwhelming.
“I have performed on big stages, but this is not… I thought I just show up and I run around, because that’s what I do at my own shows, I just run around,” she recalls in the doc. “When I got there, they were like, ‘This is your choreo.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no, wait, you must be confused. I don’t do this! I’m gonna f–k this up!”
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Ultimately, Welch hit her marks flawlessly, and the performance went off without a hitch. But in a confessional interview, she admitted her nerves nearly got the best of her in the moments before she hit the stage with Swift, 36.
“The feeling of coming up for the first time in that lift, it was kind of like landing on Mars, ‘cause I’d never seen the stage lit up before,” she said. “It’s like, you see this cultural moment from the outside, and I suddenly was inside of it. It was wild, but it was really fun and completely terrifying.”
She added that seeing Swift outside of the context of her “cozy” friend was jarring.
“Taylor is my friend, and I know her as this very cozy person, and I came out of that lift and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s f—–g Taylor Swift!’” she recalled.
The docuseries pulls back the curtains on the unseen moments from the historic Eras Tour, including everything from personal phone calls between Swift and her fiancé Travis Kelce, rehearsals backstage with Ed Sheeran before his surprise performance, and Swift’s generous gift of bonuses to every member of her crew.
The series also spotlights her dancers and choreographers, giving many of them a chance to shine and share their stories, and sheds light on Swift’s mindset after a number of devastating incidents, including the thwarted terror threat that canceled three shows in Vienna and the murder of three young girls at a Swift-themed dance class in England.
“I want to overserve the fans,” the star says of putting on the Herculean feat that was the Eras Tour. “That was my main goal.”
