Capital Breakfast presenters Jordan North and Sian Welby have shared how their station’s music programmer was offered a security guard and told to collect a laptop from a locked safe at 4am to load Taylor Swift’s new album without risk of leaks.
Speaking on Capital Breakfast, Sian explained: “Normally a file gets sent and uploaded to our system, but that wasn’t the case this time.”
Jordan added that when he arrived at 5.30am, he found music programmer Chris Chilvers already there after staying overnight in a hotel near Global’s London HQ. Chris had been asked to collect a secure laptop containing Taylor’s album from a vault in the boss’s office and manually load it into Capital’s system at 4am, minutes before the album was officially released.
Jordan said: “I’ve just been told Chris was offered a security guard in case something happened to him on the way. That’s amazing!” Sian added: “That’s MI5 level stuff. It’s unbelievable.”
The pair also revealed that Taylor’s long-time publicist, Tree Paine, personally brought a physical iPod to Global’s Leicester Square offices the day before the interview to let them hear seven tracks in a secure room. Sian said: “She literally had the tracks on an iPod with a headphone splitter. We were all sat there with headphones on listening, and we weren’t even sure if we were allowed to take notes.”
Jordan explained that the level of secrecy was unlike anything they had ever seen: “It was so top secret. We couldn’t even mention it in meetings or write it down anywhere.”
Taylor’s interview aired on Capital Breakfast as part of her promotional run following the release of her latest album, with the tight security measures showing the extraordinary lengths taken to prevent leaks ahead of one of the biggest pop releases of the year.