Taylor Swift breaks down in tears over Southport attack after meeting victims' families

Speaking in the documentary series about her Eras Tour on Disney+, which launched on Friday, the 35-year-old is revealed to have met with the survivors and families of the victims before each of a run of five shows at Wembley Stadium.

Axel Rudakubana killed Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar, and injured 10 others attending a Swift-themed dance class in the Merseyside seaside town in July last year.

Before meeting the families, Swift can be seen describing it as a “horrible attack” and adds while crying: “I’m going to meet some of these families today, and do a pop concert, you know.

“It’s going to be fine, because when I meet them, I’m not going to do this, I swear to God, I’m not going to do this."

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She continued: “I’m going to be smiling, so any of this gets out of the way before you ever go on stage, you lock it off three-and-a-half hours, they don’t have to worry about you.

“It’s like you’re like a pilot flying the plane, and if you were like, ‘oh, there’s turbulence at the head, I don’t know if we’re actually going to land in Dallas’.

“Like, I’m going to try hard, but I don’t know if I can actually, like, figure out how to land through this turbulence, like everyone on the plane is going to freak out.”

After the meetings, Swift is shown crying to her mother Andrea, who tells her: “I know you helped them, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I know you helped them.”

In a voiceover, Swift adds: “From a mental standpoint, I just do live in a reality that’s very unreal a lot of the time.

“But it’s my job to kind of be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform. That’s just the way it’s got to be.”

During the End Of An Era documentary, which is being released a day before her 36th birthday, Swift also speaks about a failed terror plot at one of her Eras Tour shows in Vienna, Austria.

Earlier in the episode, she says: “We just had this, we’ve had a series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour.

“Like we dodged, like a massacre situation, and so I’ve just been kind of all over the place, like there was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, and it was little kids that… (Swift becomes emotional and is unable to continue speaking).”

Elsewhere in the series, Swift explains that Eras Tour had been in the planning for two years and came after two negative events in her life in losing the control over her back catalogue and the Covid pandemic.

She explains: “I think I came up with the idea for the Eras Tour about two years before the tour started.

“There were two main factors that culminated in the Eras Tour, both of them were unpleasant."

She continued: “We think that these bad things are happening to me or to us, if you flip it around correctly and you react in a certain way, those things can be happening for you.

“The first one being my entire catalogue of my first six albums was sold out from under me to somebody else, and I decided to sort of defiantly re-record all of my music.

“You know, when you revisit something, you go back into that world, all this work is so indicative of the time I was in, in my life, I feel like I’m reading my old diaries, thinking about all the different girls I was until I was this one.

“So that planted a little seed, inherently, in my mind, the idea of celebrating your past.”