When the opening bars of Bad Blood rang out at Sydney’s Accor Stadium last night, thousands of eyes turned to one person – and it wasn’t Taylor Swift.
Fans at Swift’s first Sydney show were breathing the same air as more than one pop queen, with Katy Perry making a surprise appearance in the crowd.
The Roar singer – who arrived in Sydney on Friday ahead of a private gig in Melbourne tonight, which will be attended by the Prime Minister – joined Rita Ora and Taika Waititi in the VIP tent, documenting the night on social media.
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Fans couldn’t help but watch how she reacted as Swift performed her 2014 ‘diss track’ Bad Blood, believed to have been inspired by a feud between the singers that spanned several years.
Perry herself captured the moment in a video, flipping her phone camera from the stage to her stunned face, before happily singing along.
Watch the video above.
With lyrics like “Now we got problems/And I don’t think we can solve ’em” and “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes/You say sorry just for show”, Bad Blood is clearly about a relationship turned sour.
Swift has never directly confirmed it was written about Perry, but fans were convinced by a 2014 interview in which she spoke about an unnamed female musician poaching her backup dancers.
“She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me … now I have to avoid her. It’s awkward, and I don’t like it,” she said.
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Evidently, this was also enough to convince Perry, who discussed Bad Blood and her personal issues with Swift – with whom she’d previously had a warm relationship – in a 2017 interview.
“It was a full shutdown and then she writes a song about me, and I’m like, ‘OK, cool, cool, cool, that’s how you want to deal with it? Karma!” she told TV host James Corden.
“Honestly, it’s really like she started it and it’s time for her to finish it.”
While Perry’s 2017 song Swish Swish is widely believed to be a diss track about Swift, she’s also never outright said that is the case.
After years of thinly-veiled interview comments and social media posts, Swift and Perry are well and truly back on good terms, having very publicly buried the hatchet in Swift’s music video for You Need to Calm Down.
In the star-studded 2019 video, Perry and Swift, dressed as a burger and fries, spot each other from across a crowd and warmly embrace.
The pair also reunited backstage after Swift’s Friday show, with Perry sharing a photo of her in a tight hug with the Cruel Summer singer.
“Got to see an old friend shine tonight,” she wrote.
Clearly, there’s no more “bad blood” here.