Taylor Swift Eras tour: Edinburgh show worth six stars and akin to a secular religious mass ritual; Here’s our Era by Era breakdown

Two and a half hours into the epic opening night of the long-awaited UK leg of her world-beating, record-breaking, billion dollar making Eras tour, Taylor Swift swooned to the ground, as if emotionally and physically drained by performing twisted anthem The Smallest Man in the World, the bitter centrepiece of her latest chart-topping album, The Tortured Poets Department.

Two of her entourage picked the apparently unconscious superstar up and went through a circus clown routine of changing her costume and shaking her awake in time for the next song, a Hollywood musical-style romp through the defiantly upbeat I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, staged with blazing panache. The show must go on! And on! And on!

Over a year into a world tour featuring 46 songs representing 10 original albums diarising and mythologising the 34-year-old singer-songwriter’s complicated love life across her 18-year career, no one could dispute that Taylor Swift can do it with a broken heart. At this point, she can probably do it in her sleep. A roaring, singing, shrieking 73,000 strong audience at the first of three shows at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh affirmed that she can do it better than anyone else in the world right now.

Nevertheless, an open air stadium gig in Scotland presented its own unique challenges, like performing the never more appropriately named Cruel Summer with an icy wind whipping through her skimpy one piece. I could imagine my late Scottish grandmother looking Swift’s succession of negligible outfits over disapprovingly before muttering with concern: “Ye’ll catch yer death, hen.”

Indeed, in one of the few truly spontaneous moments in a tightly drilled production, one of Swift’s hands cramped from the cold, forcing her to halt a solo acoustic guitar rendition of Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve. “It’s forming a claw. This is so weird and embarrassing,” she declared, massaging her fingers back to life.