24 Hour Party People

When Tony Wilson refers to Shaun Ryder as "the greatest poet since Yeats", bless him, he means it. Even as the Factory Records experiment burned down all around him he never wavered, fanning the flames and feeding the fire to make its inevitable failure all the more spectacular. This combination of earnestness, lunacy and pomposity makes it difficult to take him quite as seriously as he takes himself, but impossible not to love him.