Credit: Spotify

Ask any serious music fan who their dream music festival encounter would be, and chances are, Liam Gallagher and the late Mac Miller would rank up in the upper echelons of anyone’s idea of having a good time.

Two pioneering artists in their own right, Gallagher and Miller are defining musicians of their respective times and genres: the 1990s Britpop scene for the former and the 2010s hip-hop for Miller. What they both have in common, however, despite the differences in their sonic artistry, is a reputation for less than saintly partying. And where better to party hard than at a music festival? There is also no greater place to meet other musicians outside the stuffy confines of meetings and award ceremonies than out in the open air, surrounded by nature, freedom, and other stuff as well, it turns out.

In a 2016 interview with Pitchfork, Miller detailed that, in some sort of dream party stimulation for the hedonist, he actually did meet Gallagher when running around the Australian music festival Big Day Out. “So I was hanging out onstage, and all of a sudden Snoop Dogg is like, ‘It’s the homie Mac Miller’s birthday’ and he dedicated ‘Gin and Juice‘ to me, and I came on stage killing it,” Miller explained in the interview, “Then I ran over to the Deftones stage and came out as [alter ego] Delusional Thomas, over some wild shit. Then I went over to Major Lazer’s set, and Liam Gallagher stopped me and was like, ‘You’re crazy, man’.”

A difficult anecdote not to feel fomo over, “I did two-fifths of Jameson and some acid, and we had a ball,” Miller said, providing further context to how he was able to bring his sort of energy to the festival, adding, “Kurupt was my drinking buddy that whole tour; we would drink every morning at 10 am and go hard. Kurupt was like, ‘Mac, I haven’t had someone to drink with like this since Nate [Dogg] and 2Pac died’. I was like, ‘That’s the nicest thing that anyone’s ever said to me’.”

The interview is a particularly bittersweet one to read seven years on from Miller’s tragic death. In it, the beloved rapper responds to being asked who should play him in a movie on his life with “obviously, the Mecca of who would play older Mac would be Bill Murray, just him being himself. My hope is that one day I’ll become Bill Murray”. However, perhaps the last question is particularly the most haunting from the Q&A, which concluded with the musician being asked what he’d like to have engraved on this tombstone, to which he responded jovially, “He did that shit”.

Miller died of a drug overdose on September 7th, 2018, at 26, one year short of making it into the equally devastating ’27 Club’. Fans and musicians across the world expressed their shock and grief, and despite crossing paths with the young rapper just once, Liam Gallagher was among the many public figures to pay their respects to the musician.

Speaking at Lollapalooza Berlin a few days after his death, Gallagher addressed the crowd to announce, “I’d like to dedicate this to a lad who’s just died, Mac Miller”.