Florence Welch might be used to commanding festival stages alongside her band Florence + The Machine, but even she wasn’t ready for the finely tuned machinery that is Taylor Swift’s TheEras Tour.
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The Florence + the Machine leader appears in Taylor Swift’s new Disney+ docuseries Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour – The End of an Era, where she recounts her surprise duet performance of “Florida!!!” during Swift’s final night at London’s Wembley Stadium in August 2024.
The moment marked a rare onstage link-up between the two artists — and, as Welch admits, came with a heavy dose of pressure.
“I have performed on big stages, but I thought I’d just run around because that’s what I do at my own shows,” Welch recalls in the doc.
“When I got there, they were like, ‘This is your choreography.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no, wait, you must be confused. I don’t do this! I’m gonna f— this up!’”
Of course, she didn’t — Welch nailed her cues, hit the emotional high note, and helped close out one of Swift’s five Wembley nights without a hitch. But even a seasoned performer can get a little starstruck when faced with the sheer scale of Swift’s universe.
“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,” Welch continues. “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.”
Welch also admitted that seeing Swift as the pop deity at the center of a global phenomenon — rather than as her “cozy” friend — briefly scrambled her brain.
“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—ing Taylor Swift!’”
The docuseries, which dropped its first two episodes this week on Disney+, pulls the curtain back on the tour’s unseen moments — from backstage rehearsal hangouts with Ed Sheeran to personal calls with Travis Kelce that Swift likens to a “vitamin drip.”
“I want to overserve the fans,” Swift says in the series. “That was my main goal.”
