As of this week, visitors to the Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester, will find among the rain-smudged stones a brand-new memorial that resembles, among other things, an art gallery plaque, a giant business card and the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is the headstone of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, who died in August 2007. Attention-grabbing, unashamedly pretentious and arriving later than scheduled, the stone is an apt tribute to one of the most confounding and charismatic figures in British music.

A headstone can't sum up a life, but it can offer a glimpse of a personality, for better or worse. Elvis Presley's memorial in Graceland boasts 18 lines of extravagant praise; Jim Morrison's Paris grave bears a cryptic epitaph in Greek. Wilson's, created by Factory designers Peter Saville and Ben Kelly, is deliberately oblique and peppered with insider references.

"Anthony H Wilson" is the name he started using in the 90s "to wind up all the people in Manchester who think I'm a flash twat". "Cultural catalyst" is comically grandiose, yet not inaccurate. When he founded Factory in 1978, he didn't just build a home for bands such as Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays – he built a piece of a conceptual art masquerading as a record label. Factory granted catalogue numbers to such unlikely objects as a hairdressing salon and a lawsuit. The headstone's quotation from Mrs G Linneaus Banks's 1876 novel The Manchester Man speaks to what this proud Mancunian once called "an excess of civic pride". The stark beauty of the stone itself reminds you that aesthetics were as important to Wilson as music, and infinitely more vital than commerce. Saville's elaborate die-cut sleeve for early pressings of New Order's Blue Monday famously lost Factory a couple of pence on each copy sold, a story that Wilson never tired of telling.

The headstone doesn't have a Factory catalogue number (that tradition ended with Wilson's coffin, FAC 501), but it is firmly in that lineage: a piece of art to puzzle and intrigue cemetery visitors for decades to come. When he was writing 24 Hour Party People (a curiously postmodern novelisation of Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film about Factory), Wilson asked himself: "What do I do? Tell the truth or go for the myth?" His instinct was to "go with the myth every time". Saville and Kelly have paid their late friend the highest possible tribute by burnishing that myth.