Taylor Swift cupcakes. Taylor Swift pianos. Taylor Swift singing lecturers. And a share of the Taylor Swift £1 billion windfall
Taylor Swift cupcakes. Taylor Swift pianos. Taylor Swift singing lecturers. And a share of the Taylor Swift £1 billion windfall
The world’s biggest star is coming to town
Dear readers — we hope you aren't feeling too worse for wear after the Baltic Weekender, and are Berocca’d up ready for today’s action-packed edition. If you are feeling a little on the fragile side though, steer well clear of the Anfield area. The city is dressing itself up for the imminent arrival of a pop star so earth-shaking her previous performances have caused ground tremors that have literally registered on the Richter Scale. Welcome to Taylor Town.
Over the weekend we published another fantastic piece from writer Leo Hardwick. You may remember him from such hits as this piece on solving an impossible murder, and this piece on the infamous Cameo killings. On Saturday though, he took a step away from murder mystery into the world of poetry, shining a light on the forgotten connections between the poet Constantine P Cavafy and Liverpool.
“The only real sources we have on Cavafy are his poems – and in these, all is open to interpretation. He destroyed most of his letters and left very few journals…he was gay, and this may partly explain why so much of his private correspondence was destroyed.”
Or perhaps a gentle peruse of one of last week’s editions (about a bizarre feud at a city centre sex shop) is more your speed. Read at your leisure here.
Editor’s note: We had another fantastic month of growth here at The Post in May, with plenty of party poppers on the go to celebrate hitting 75 new members. That brings our grand total up to 1,611 of you — cheers! For those of you yet to join us as a paying member, now is a great time. We have some fantastic stories coming up for you in June, including an investigation by Jack involving crypto, Costa Rica and a well known figure in Liverpool…
To read that story make sure you hit the button below. It costs just £7 a month and helps us fund investigations like that, as well as our team of freelancers, editors and lawyers who make sure The Post can keep on producing the kind of high quality journalism Merseyside deserves.
Big story: Taylor Swift cupcakes. Taylor Swift pianos. Taylor Swift singing lecturers. And a share of the Taylor Swift £1 billion windfall
Top line: If you hate Taylor Swift, you’d be well advised to book a hideout as far away from Liverpool as possible next week, self-impose a media blackout and cut the telephone cord. The entire city is being dressed up to welcome the world’s biggest pop star (Taylor Town, they’re calling it) and little wonder: a roughly £250m economic boost is on the table.
What’s been lined up? Honestly, what hasn’t? Taylor Swift cupcake making courses. Check. A day of free lectures about Swift provided by the University of Liverpool, which will end with the university’s academics singing their research to the tune of her hits (entitled “critical karaoke”). Check. A moss-covered piano representing Swift’s “Evermore era”. Check. Eleven art installations dotted around the city to symbolise each of her albums. Also check.
Cruel Summer? A few dissenting voices have questioned whether it all feels a little small time for a city like Liverpool to be this beside itself at the presence of a visiting pop star. It doesn’t appear any of the other three UK cities hosting her have gone to quite such extreme lengths (although in Edinburgh there has been an unfortunate row after some homeless people were expelled to Aberdeen and Glasgow to make room for descending Swifties). And after all, it’s not like Liverpool is a stranger to global music icons sending 20-somethings manic.
Down bad: But is Swift’s arrival the manna from heaven Liverpool’s battered economy desperately needs?
When the dates were announced, search for hotels in Liverpool rose by nearly 6,000% according to data from Booking.com (almost every room and Airbnb rental in the entire city is now booked up).
Barclays conducted a report that found the ticket release for the tour last summer caused a 15.8% year-on-year increase in UK entertainment spending.
According to Forbes, the Eras tour will generate close to $5 billion in consumer spending in the United States alone. In the UK, it is expected to cause a £997 million economic boost (that’s the combined total of 1.2 million fans spending on tickets, travel, accommodation, outfits and so on).
Thriller: “We’ve not seen anything like this since the days of Michael Jackson at Aintree in the ’80s. But this is on another level,” Robin Kemp, Liverpool’s Creative Director, told The Post.
A Taylor four cities: Speaking to the Echo, Claire McColgan, the city’s director of culture, suggested the best way to predict the potential economic boost from the three concerts was simply to split the near-billion windfall four ways, as Swift will be performing in four UK cities (the others are London, Cardiff and Edinburgh). That gets us to the £250m figure.
All you had to do was stay: Liverpool has long been heavily reliant on tourism, making its money from those who come for some fun, then clear off. One in five jobs here rely on it. To some, that’s a bad thing: the city still struggles relative to some of its rivals when it comes to attracting higher wage jobs. But sometimes it’s best to play to your strengths — and no-one could deny we know how to throw a party.
Back in February, we sent David Lloyd to investigate how the Swift phenomenon had become so huge and what that would mean for Liverpool. Dave Fawbert, the brains behind the all-Taylor-all-night club night, Swiftogeddon, had big words.
“Every city that Taylor plays in makes it onto global news networks,” Dave says. “It’s a real cultural phenomenon. You’re so lucky to have it in Liverpool. It’s going to be incredible.”
Your Post briefing
“It’s not going to be like HS2,” Steve Rotheram told an audience gathered to watch him and Andy Burnham launch the Liverpool-Manchester Railway Board, which will create a strategy for a £17 billion rail link between the two cities. “This is going to happen.” But will Liverpool get a fair deal? Many in the city’s private sector have questioned why the line will link to Manchester Airport and not Liverpool John Lennon (as one response to Place North West’s report on the launch of the board reads: “Once again Liverpool is the puppet”). We’d be keen to hear our readers’ thoughts on the new board as we’ll be digging deeper into what the plans will mean for Liverpool and the region. Please email editor@livpost.co.uk.
“Is there anyone in the world that's been more serious about buying football clubs in history than Josh Wander?” Josh Wander once asked, during the heady days in which his firm 777 Partners seemed to be closing in on the takeover of Everton from much-derided Farhad Moshiri. For the sake of Everton’s fans and their sanity, let’s hope the answer is yes. 777’s takeover bid fell through over the weekend after a will-they-won’t-they saga that spanned several months but achieved little beyond the undeniable comedy of Wander’s self-aggrandising comments. Everton now say they are assessing “all options for the club’s future ownership” with another American apparently circling: businessman John Textor. More details at a click.
How highly do you rate a humble bowl of scouse? Better than the Andalusian tapas bars of Seville, serving serranito and salmorejo? Better even than Porto, the canned fish capital of Portugal? Right up there alongside international gastronomic big hitters like Naples, Lima and Ho Chi Minh City? While a shiny Michelin star continues to elude the city, the folks at TimeOut believe Liverpool’s culinary offering is truly that good, ranking the city 11th in the world for its food offer.
Home of the week
This three bedroom extended home in Maghull is on the market for £300,000. Simply decorated for those that want to add a touch of their personal style after moving in, the property has new appliances throughout with a sleek granite kitchen and utility room downstairs. Double doors open up onto a patio and garden, with a driveway and storage garage included in the price. Take the full tour here.
Home of the Week is sponsored by North Wall Property. To sell your home without the stress visit the website or check out their five-star reviews.
Post Picks
🎹Electronic music legend Gary Numan celebrates the 45th anniversary of his 1979 albums Replicas and The Pleasure Principle on Tuesday at the O2 Academy. Doors open at 7pm — grab a ticket here.
🎨On Wednesday Camp and Furnace is hosting a talk on the art history of Studio Ghibli, the legendary Japanese film studio. The talk is presented by Helen McCarthy, who wrote some of the first books on anime in English and on Ghibli’s co-founding director Hayao Miyazaki. Find out more here.
🕺A slightly more wholesome festival than the Baltic Weekender this week — Dream On Family Festival takes over Blundellsands Tennis Club on Saturday with live music, an international food court, bar, market stalls, inflatables and art installations. Tickets available here.
🎵If you’re as excited as we are about the economic boost of Taylor Swift’s arrival, why not get in the spirit with a celebration of all things Swift at the O2? Clubnight Swiftogeddon heads over there this Saturday for the Eras pre party – find out more here.
Recommended reads
This great piece from Liverpool DJ, writer and performance artist PJ for Seven Store is well worth a read this week. In it, he meets the self-proclaimed ‘world’s biggest Lacoste collector’ — a French man named Jalal in Avignon. “Lacoste is where fashion meets function,” Jalal tells him. “All my Lacoste pieces are treasures.”
"They sailed from Liverpool and they brought home the world, and they really did.” As Liverpool is set to host the naming ceremony of the Cunard Line’s latest cruise ship, the BBC looks back at the history of the Cunard — which started its transatlantic route nearly 200 years ago, taking people from Liverpool to North America. “My granddad and his friends would talk about bringing one of the first jukeboxes back to Liverpool full of 45s,” one woman told the BBC. “[It was full of] records that nobody in Liverpool had ever heard before."
Please stop with the "Taylor Swift's tour will generate nearly a billion pounds for the UK" and the even worse take "it will generate £250m for Liverpool". As this FT article (which has as many bad Taylor puns as the Post) says, it's a made-up figure that has little grounding in reality https://on.ft.com/3wXo9AV
(The FT is mostly paywalled and this is a link that only allows a limited number of free views so some may not be able to view it - sorry!) For those not able to view it there are three key errors in the figure
a) it assumes every penny spent will stay in the UK/Liverpool (all your pounds spent on Taylor merch certainly won't)
b) it assumes that people will pay a fortune for resale tickets and factors that into the average ticket price which is then multiplied up (which again won't all stay in the venue city and ignores the fact that people might have spent the money anyway, just not on Taylor tickets)
c) it assumes that the money spent in restaurants and bars would not have been spent otherwise, so everyone going to the Taylor Swift concert would not eat if they hadn't got tickets
I think it's great that we have probably the biggest pop star in the world playing in the city and I'm sure it will provide a big short term boost for the hospitality industry. But it's nonsense to claim that we're getting a £1/4bn pound boost as a consequence.
(A potentially better long-term economic outcome would be that Taylor plus Eurovision means that Liverpool becomes the obvious northern UK venue for a big name star every year - Beyonce 2025 anyone?)
Taylor who?