In 24 Hour Party People, Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis – associated with mordant integrity – is found hung, his feet swinging in front of a tv screen that’s playing a bizarre sequence. A chicken is on a hot metal plate, and in moving its feet away from the surface appears to be dancing. A very American yeehah is heard over the top. The suicide occurs on the eve of the band’s American tour.

Later, at a crucial takeover meeting with London Records, the new Happy Mondays album is the ace in Factory Records label boss Tony Wilson’s hand. A healthy-looking buffet is spread on the £30,000 table in the Factory boardroom. Shaun Ryder dismisses it as being ‘bunny food’, and he and the other band members go for Kentucky Fried Chicken, even refusing the offer of it being ordered in to get it themselves.

It’s in large part thanks to the Happy Mondays that Factory is in this situation at all, having blown the money intended for recording in Nassau on crack and weed. And Ryder, who exhibits thuggish tendencies not evident in the portrayal of Curtis and Wilson, is emblematic of a shift in the kinds of culture that led to the formation of Factory in the first place. Wilson is insistent that Ryder is a poet in the league of Keats – and even God agrees with him, though God takes the form of a bearded version of Wilson, that he – and only he - sees while smoking a spliff on the roof of the Factory building. The joint is shared with members of New Order, the band who’ve been with him since their early days as Joy Division, who for all their excesses have more claim to musical credibility than the scally Mondays. Ryder sells Wilson the DAT tape of the music the band recorded on their expensive holiday: there are no vocals, and getting his lyrics on the music is what’s led to the meeting with London to begin with. Shaun Ryder’s not just ready to dance: he’d be happy to be served up in a family bucket of finger’ lickin’ poultry pieces if it was heavily sprinkled with cocaine.

Birds and flight are another rich source of meaning within the film. It opens with a sequence in which Wilson flies a hang glider for a local news report, and he breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience that this is a reference to the myth of Icarus, and to look it up if necessary. The first mention of the Happy Mondays is when the lads of the band poison thousands of pigeons, whose bodies plummet from the sky and litter Manchester. Chickens, interestingly, are flightless birds – though, like Ian Curtis, they do a weird little dance when the heat is on.