Taylor Swift admitted her fears of being recorded or videoed without her permission a year before the furore that would sensationally erupt over a recorded phone conversation between her and Kanye West.
In 2015, Swift was asked if she had ever experienced anxiety dreams during a conversation with presenter Dave Berry ahead of the Brit Awards. Replying that she did, the perceptive singer said her real life was also “peppered with ridiculous anxiety”.
“I have a lot of issue with rooms like this, because I always feel like someone has bugged the room, and is either videoing me or recording me, like dressing rooms and stuff, so that’s one of my paranoias.“
An underlying fear of being surreptitiously recorded was something she also voiced during an interview with Rolling Stone in 2014, where the paranoia coupled with her heightened level of fame was conveyed throughout the interview.
Describing her concern about spies or recording devices during her secret video shoot for “Shake it Off”, she said: “Don’t even get me started on wiretaps. It’s not a good thing for me to talk about socially. I freak out.”
“There's someone whose entire job it is to figure out things that I don't want the world to see,” she elaborated. “They look at your career, they look at what you prioritise, and they try to figure out what would be the most revealing or hurtful. Like, I don't take my clothes off in pictures or anything – I'm very private about that. So it scares me how valuable it would be to get a video of me changing. It's sad to have to look for cameras in dressing rooms and bathrooms. I don't walk around naked with my windows open, because there's a value on that.”
