Charli XCX hits back at fans chanting ‘Taylor Swift is dead’ at her show

Charli XCX has issued a strong warning to fans after some chanted “Taylor Swift is dead” at a show in Brazil.

The singer-songwriter, also known as Charlotte Aitchison, recently played her Partygirl DJ set at a nightclub in São Paulo.

Footage uploaded by attendees seems to show some people shouting the phrase “Taylor Swift is dead” in Portuguese.

Reacting to the fans’ behaviour, Charli, 31, shared a message on social media, posted over a screengrab of a video alerting her to the distasteful chant.

“Can the people who do this please stop,” she wrote on her Instagram story on Sunday (23 June). “Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community. I will not tolerate it.”

Since the release of Charli’s sixth album, Brat, earlier this month, fans of the “360” artist have dissected songs and shared theories about whether certain lyrics are directed to some of her contemporaries.

While the track “Girl, so confusing” was rumoured (and later confirmed) to be about Lorde, the song “Sympathy is a knife” is considered by many to contain references to Swift.

Lyrics from the song include: “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show / Fingers crossed behind my back / I hope they break up quick.”

Charli is engaged to George Daniel, the drummer of the indie-pop band The 1975, whose frontman Matty Healy briefly dated Swift in 2023.

In 2018, the “Boom Clap” singer was a support artist on Swift’s Reputation Tour, alongside Camila Cabello.

While being an opening act exposed Charli to a larger audience, the singer later said that the experience has made her realise that she no longer wanted to open for other artists.

“I’m really grateful that [Taylor] asked me on that tour. But as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up on stage and waving to five-year-olds,” she said in a Pitchfork profile in 2019. “I need to just own my own f***ing s*** finally.”

In her four-star review of Brat, The Independent’s critic Helen Brown praised Charli’s candid nature across the album, quoting the lyric “I’m famous, but not quite”.

“The admission is as bold, blunt, challenging, and vulnerable as the album on which it appears,” she writes. “BRAT is a hedonistic, ultraviolet collection of songs whose thumping – slightly disorienting – club beats more than succeed in their aim of ‘capturing a feeling of chaos’.”