Taylor Swift hits London – but where’s the respect?

Taylor Swift, the 19-year-old country music sensation who was first signed up as a professional songwriter in Nashville at the age of 14, has finally made it to London. But while the hundreds of teenage girls who packed the Shepherds Bush Empire came close to screaming the house down, where was the respect from  London's music critics?

Alice Fisher in the Observer said she had never encountered screaming like it. "I've seen Madonna, Girls Aloud and Kylie live and by comparison with Taylor Swift they were greeted with ennui."

But while Swift's brand of 'country lite' seemed to make sense to the teenagers, her appeal as a performer was less obvious to the critic. "Her face didn't move enough when she told the audience how much she loved them for it so sound believable," said Fisher.

As for her piano-based rendition of You're Not Sorry, it "was undermined by the way Swift writhed on her stool and awkwardly thumped the piano lid in one of the most unconvincing displays of passion I've seen since Footballers' Wives finished".

In the Financial Times, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney was reminded of a "chaste, pre-Britney era of teen-pop". But he was puzzled by the inaudible banjo on You Belong With Me and the missing mandolin on Fearless, title track of her triple-platinum-selling second album. Was this "decountrification" of her music a cynical ploy to appeal to British ears?

As for her voice, said the man from the FT, she's no virtuoso as a singer, but "the ordinariness was part of her appeal".

When Fearless was released last November, the New Yorker devoted a full length profile to the blonde singer whose family uprooted themselves from Pennsylvania and moved to Tennessee so that the 13-year-old prodigy could turn professional.

The New Yorker's pop writer Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that the "precocious wisdom" of her song writing put her in a league with Hank Williams, Prince, Elvis Costello, and Randy Newman. In the following weeks, the single Love Story became the most downloaded country song ever, selling two million online, while the success of Fearless made her America's top-selling artist last year.

Back to Alice Fisher in the Observer who admitted she "drifted off" - despite that incessant screaming - during Fearless, Love Story and a number of other songs. Ouch. ·