Taylor Swift can be seen breaking down in tears in her new documentary after meeting with the survivors and families of the Southport attack.
The US singer met privately with those impacted by the attack before a run of five shows at Wembley Stadium last summer.
The knife attack saw Axel Rudakubana kill three young girls and injure 10 people attending a Swift-themed dance class in the Merseyside seaside town in July last year.
Speaking in the Disney+ documentary series about her Eras Tour, released on Friday, Swift describes the incident as a “horrible attack” before meeting with the families.
She added 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.
“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 meeting, Swift is shown breaking down in tears as she walks backstage with her mother, Andrea.
She said she felt the need to “lock off” her emotions before performing her three-and-a-half-hour concert.
“From a mental standpoint, I just do live in a reality that’s very unreal a lot of the time,” she said in episode one of the documentary, which premiered in New York this week. “But it’s my job to be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform.”
Her emotional burden was heightened following Swift’s return to the stage in Wembley after she cancelled three shows in Vienna, Austria, because of a suspected terror attack.
She said she “dodged a massacre situation” after the CIA confirmed the suspects in a terror plot to attack Swift intended to kill “tens of thousands” of people.
The singer, who has been performing for over 20 years, said, “Being afraid that something is going to happen to your fans at any moment is a new challenge”.
Swift expressed relief after performing her London show and spoke to her fiancé, Travis Kelce, over a phone call about feeling so happy she “thought I was going to forget how to play guitar and sing”.
“It’s like the crowd knew I needed a pick-me-up,” she said.
These insights and her backstage moments were revealed in the singer’s six-part series entitled The End of An Era, which debuts on Disney+ on Friday.
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