A Taylor Swift fan whose front-row zealotry caught the constant attention of a security guard — whose response then caught the attention of Swift herself — has spoken out on what happened during and after the confrontation during “Bad Blood” at a Philadelphia show.
Kelly Kelly, a third-grade teacher from Baltimore, was attending the show with sister Kirstin Birmingham and two friends, all with first-row seats in front of the ramp that extended out into the Lincoln Financial Field audience. Kelly told ABC’s “Good Morning America” and the Daily Mail about what transpired with security, and Swift’s reaction, on Saturday night — leading to their getting free tickets to come back for the third and final Philly concert Sunday night.
“He just kept telling me to stop; he kept telling me to calm down and, like, not to dance,” Kelly said on “GMA.” “And I guess she noticed, and she yelled at him and told him to leave me alone, and that I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
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The guard apparently had to be told that he was being reprimanded by the ultimate security: the world’s biggest pop star.
“The security guard had no idea what was going on,” said Birmingham, Kelly’s sister, “so I was like, ‘Hey, Taylor’s talking to you.’ And then he quickly, like, I don’t know, he left.”
“I think it meant so much to everybody else, too,” said Kelly. “Like, her fans know she has our back.”
Kelly elaborated on the experience with the Daily Mail: “I was just dancing, and this security guard was just crazy, yelling at us. He didn’t want us to take photos in front of the stage. He was being very strict. … He had been like that all night; he was really annoyed. I know Taylor Swift — she wants people to come to her shows and have fun. I wasn’t doing anything outrageous; I wasn’t trying to get to the other side of the barrier. Every time we would dance he would say, ‘You need to back up.’
“My sister then was shouting ‘Turn around, Taylor is yelling at you.’ He didn’t know what was going on.”
Although there were tweets emerging about security guards allegedly manhandling fans at the barricades — with some claims to that regard coming from fans on the other side of the ramp — Kelly said that the guard who was confronting her never touched her or her friends.
This may go down as a mild altercation in the lawsuit-filled history of confrontations between fans and security at concerts over the years. But it becomes headline news when it causes the biggest pop star in the world to veer off course, however fleetingly, from the normal flow of the Eras Tour, a stadium outing so big that it attracts international attention every weekend, even almost two months into the outing.
Swift’s part in the interchange Saturday was captured on fan video, inevitably, and quickly picked up steam among Swifties, with millions of views by Sunday morning.
“She’s fine,” Swift is first seen telling security during the middle of “Bad Blood.” “She wasn’t doing anything.” The singer then shouts: “Hey! Stop!” And then again, after the next scheduled use of the word “hey!” in the lyrics, she once again orders security to “stop,” before resuming her singing and choreography.
Swift’s comments went by so quickly that not everyone in the stadium registered that a confrontation was happening — especially with the way her first “Hey!” fit right in with the “hey” exclamations of the song being performed.
Said “GMA” host Lara Spencer, “It wouldn’t surprise any of us to hear a new song called ‘She Wasn’t Doing Anything (Taylor’s Version).’ She even made a reprimand sound good… That remix is coming.”
Despite the fact that Swift is doing as many three nights per stand in a city, as in Philadelphia (with as many as 150,000 tickets on sale for each of those engagements), and despite the fact that fans are sending out illicit streams of the show each night, demand has only risen, and resale prices too, as the Eras Tour has proceeded.
A scan of Seat Geek tickets for upcoming shows done by a fan Monday morning indicated that, for Swift’s upcoming shows, the rock-bottom, get-in-the-door price for forthcoming concerts ranged from $1500-2200 a seat in any given city.
