Last summer, as I watched punk-pop band Dream Wife fling themselves around a stage at the Latitude festival, a mosh pit formed around me.

We need to see how many xo auto we've spun, because some slot games have to get rounds of spinning to check the jackpots in the game breaks. 

In normal times, I'd have jumped right into it. Arms would have flailed, heads would have been banged, chaos would have ensured.

On this occasion, I slowly backed away and re-attached my mask.

Latitude was one of the first festivals to be designated a government pilot event as lockdown restrictions eased. It was allowed to go ahead on the condition that everyone had a negative Covid test or proof of a vaccine.

There was an expectation that people would catch the virus. Scientists were deliberately studying the rate of transmission to see what sort of threat festivals posed to the wider population.

Observing the audience, there was a definite split between the moshers and the maskers. Later in the year, I spoke to a crowd safety expert who had witnessed the same phenomenon: some concertgoers were unleashing two years of pent-up energy, but others were anxious about being back in a large crowd.

For the first time in his career, he said, he couldn't predict how an audience would behave.

US singer Maggie Rogers says she saw that dichotomy up close at California's Coachella festival this April.