Introduction: Covid Recovery and Early Covid Music Literature

Abstract

While commencing the introduction of this special edition in the early months of 2021, the live music industries across the world were just beginning to tentatively emerge from what one commentator described as their “biggest collective threat in living memory”—COVID-19 (Mullova 2020). In England for example, as part of the “post-Covid” recovery process, a government-sanctioned trial event took place in Liverpool’s Sefton Park on 2 May 2021, where 5,000 people attended with no masks or social distancing, in what Youngs (2021) described as “the largest number of people to have legally crammed into a small space in the UK since the start of the pandemic”. Despite this being an iconic occasion for both artists and audience, the event gave scientists the opportunity to study factors such as the impacts of audience movement and catering and alcohol consumption, with it being compulsory for all attendees to take supervised lateral flow tests. This concert, promoted by Festival Republic, was part of the UK Government’s broader “Events Research Programme”, which included activities such as the FA Cup final and the World Snooker Championships. This series of events, overseen by an industry-led steering group and taking place between 18 April and 15 May 2021, were used to inform UK Government policy on social distancing, ventilation and test and trace protocols (UK Government 2021).