As he played Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage on Saturday, Liam Gallagher dedicated Slide Away to a fan who’d been taken ill.
“Last year,” he told the crowd, “I met this lovely lady and she wasn’t too well”.
“She said, ‘If you do Glastonbury, can you dedicate this song to me… if I get there?’
“Well, I’m here, and hopefully you’re here. This one’s for her, she’s called Lauren.”
It turns out that Lauren is Lauren Mahon, the host of 5 Live’s You, Me And The Big C – a podcast about living with cancer.
Mahon, who was indeed in the audience at the Pyramid Stage, says the dedication was a bolt from the blue, based on a conversation she had with the singer last year at a Stand Up To Cancer event.
“They always say don’t meet your heroes, but he was absolutely unbelievably kind,” she recalls.
“I told him the story that, basically, two years ago I’d just finished chemo and surgery, and I’d pushed my radiotherapy back a week so I could come here. It was my goal to get back to Glastonbury.
“I went to see Liam at the Other Stage and he played Slide Away, and I cried my eyes out with all my friends.
“So I told him that story. I just said, ‘Babe, you brought me back to life.’ And he said, ‘Tell you what, next time I play Glastonbury, I’m dedicating Slide Away to you.’
“I really didn’t think anything would come about. We got on really well, and he was lovely and considerate and kind, but I didn’t think he would remember me. Then he did it!
“It’s mad,” she added. “I still can’t believe it happened. I don’t know where I go from here in life.”
Coincidentally, Gallagher’s dedication came the night after The Killers played A Dustland Fairytale for Mahon’s co-host, Rachel Bland, who succumbed to cancer last September, during their Glastonbury warm-up show in Wales.
They honoured Bland after her husband, Steve, contacted the band to explain how, during her illness, seeing them in concert had lifted her spirits.
“We had seen them a couple of times in the last couple of years when she wasn’t well but when we would go to a concert and see them it kind of made her forget what she was going through and how unwell she really was,” he said.
Before playing the song in her memory, singer Brandon Flowers told the crowd: “There was a light that went out too soon, her name was Rachael, will you put your lights up for us in her memory?”
Source: bbc.co.uk