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Don’t mess with Taylor Swift

 

Stefanie Marsh

 

She doesn’t take drugs and she doesn’t have meltdowns. But cross the pop star at your peril – especially if you’re an ex-boyfriend

 

There comes a moment in every hack’s life when they realise that they’re technically old and that it is time to reconfigure all their journalistic instincts, brush up on their street patois and start reading Grazia – all so as not to be considered “lame”, thick or dreary by the “younger generation”. My moment came three weeks ago in the run-up to interviewing Taylor Swift, an American, supposedly unspeakably prim new breed of squeaky clean pop star whose trillions of, mostly female, fans – not to mention record sales – seems to indicate that she will soon be “mega” on a Britney Spears level, but without a shaven-headed druggy episode mid-career.

 

Taylor Swift is 23. At 13, she was put on staff by Sony as one of its songwriters. She does not dress up as a naughty schoolgirl in her videos, take drugs or sing semi-covertly about blow jobs. Forbes estimated her earnings at $57 million (£38 million), making her the world’s 11th highest-earning person in showbusiness, a couple of notches behind Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise but miles ahead of Beyoncé, Sir Paul McCartney and Angelina Jolie. Some people complain that she sounds reedy when she sings live (partly because, unlike most pop queens, she refuses to correct her pitch with Auto-Tune), but Neil Young loves her songwriting, as do Lady Gaga and Rolling Stone, which has compared her to Carole King and Joni Mitchell. Stevie Nicks predicts she will “save the music business”. Swift’s speciality is emotionally literate torch songs, mainly about her exes.

 

Until I was assigned the Swift job, I had never heard of Harry Styles. Whenever I had inadvertently glimpsed his face on the internet or the tabloids or on television, I’d filed it away in the anonymous pubescent boy-band person compartment of my brain, along with some vague thoughts that he had way too much hair. (Note to over-30-year-olds: shaggy-hair phobia is an incontestable sign that you are headed for Victor Meldrew territory.) But before interviewing Swift, word spread among the under-thirtysomethings in my life: “You are going to ask her about Harry, aren’t you?” they said scornfully, and when I replied, nonchalantly, that I had no idea who he was, they stood over me until I’d typed his name into Google and acknowledged that the mop-headed 15-year-old nonentity is in fact 19, the lead singer of the Simon Cowell vehicle One Direction, a fully formed international heart-throb with enviable “bastard” pop-star status whose band is always in the process of trying to elbow Swift off her No 1 spot in the charts. Mop-head, it turns out, is also the only recently extinguished former flame of Taylor Swift.

 

I slowly began to grasp that “Taylor” and “Harry” (the young no longer bother with surnames) form something of an elite in the new world order, along with the cast of Made in Chelsea and Justin Bieber’s worrying new hairstyle. There are blogs so full of Taylor/Harry gossip at the time of the break-up – the once happy couple seemed to have split up in the Caribbean over Christmas, with Styles finding solace in a hot tub on Sir Richard Branson’s private island while Swift was (supposedly) covertly photographed looking lonely and abandoned on a luxury yacht – it is a wonder they had anything to blog about before this ill-fated union. The entire universe seemed to want to get the lowdown on the split, as well as “deets” (details) on any movement in Swift’s dating activity.

 

The day before I met her, she had performed at the Brits, ripping off a wedding dress mid-song to reveal an untried and untested combo of – tutted and slavered the press – “revealing” long-sleeved T-shirt, knee-high boots and shorts. (Swift has been very famous since she was 16, when she used to wear cowboy boots and gingham.) Anyway. The song she performed, an autobiographical smash hit about a relationship fall-out between our first-person narrator and a “mystery” ex, is called I Knew You Were Trouble. It is extremely catchy in the same way as her previous hit We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together (also about a mystery ex). The lyrics to Trouble include the killer line: “You never loved me or her, or anyone, or anything,” which rather juicily implies a cold-hearted soul of the sort Swift’s teenage female fans will identify with as they mournfully listen to it over and over again in their bedrooms. (P.S. I love it, too.) “Who is Trouble about?” I asked the under-30-year-olds. Collectively, they rolled their eyes (#howcanshebeajournalistandnotknowthis). “It’s so like obviously about Harry Styles.” That afternoon, Swift’s PR rang me to say that Swift loves antiques and cooking, but was not going to talk about her ex-boyfriends.

 

In a hotel suite in London, a tall, gawky (6ft 1in in heels), impeccably made-up, cheerful with an edge of the ribald, knowing yet well-mannered young woman – her forehead adorned by a (controversial) new fringe, her dress totally obscured by a long baggy jumper – sits politely opposite me, doing a good impression of a woman ten years older. Swift is almost unbelievably courteous and genial, and I understand why The Hollywood Reporter has described her as “the best People Person since Bill Clinton”.

 

The formalities over with, Swift exclaims how excited she is to meet me. Why are you excited to meet me? “Because,” she replies, so endearingly that I am completely unprepared for the fabrication that comes next, “you’re one of the most educated people in the whole world! So it’s really exciting for me.” Normally, I take the British view on shameless flattery – it is unforgivable. The problem is, she’s such fun that even the Swift “haters” don’t really hate her. Even when they’re slagging her off, the celeb gossip bloggers have taken to referring to her, affectionately, as “T-Swizzle”. She is also – annoyingly for me (it’s always so perversely satisfying interviewing people you can’t stand) – funny, highly intelligent and a tad geeky and eccentric. Occasionally, she lets slip weird thoughts such as, “I go into a trance when I’m in an antiques store.” And her exuberance for other people has stood her well. As a young, struggling musician, she would turn up at radio stations with home-made biscuits for the DJs. “People get confused when they’re musicians,” she says. “They think they have no boss. When really it’s the other way around – we have more bosses than anyone else. Every person who buys our records is our boss. And every time we go onto a radio station – you think that DJ isn’t your boss?”

 

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