Pop immortality cuts both ways. If you’re a highly successful artist and you die, you are assured of a long afterlife on CD, on DVD and in the iPods and hearts of millions — yet, just as you were continually bothered in life by people who wanted a piece of you, so your mortal remains may not rest in anything resembling peace. Earlier this year, a memorial stone for Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, went missing from Macclesfield cemetery. The stone bears his name, the date “18-5-80” — when he hanged himself — and a song title, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Like knife crime, what we might call “pop memorial crime” is far from a 2008 invention. Eight years ago, the graves of Ronnie van Zant and Steve Gaines, two members of Lynyrd Skynyrd who died in a 1977 plane crash, were interfered with by persons unknown in Florida. Van Zant’s tomb was opened, exposing his coffin, and Gaines’s ashes were removed from his mausoleum.

Musicians’ remains are occasionally tied up in legal disputes. When James Brown died last year, it took 76 days to bury him because of a tussle over the godfather of soul’s legacy. And, this year, there have been calls for the body of the Supremes singer Florence Ballard to be exhumed. Ballard died in 1976, at the age of 32, officially as the result of a blood clot, hypertension and heart disease, but her sister Maxine believes she was murdered because she was threatening to expose some of Motown’s darkest secrets.

One surefire way to rest in peace is to be cremated. After George Harrison, the most spiritual of the Beatles, died in 2001, his ashes are thought to have been placed in the Ganges — and possibly in the Yamuna, another sacred Indian river. Dusty Springfield, who died in 1999, had some of her crematorial residue sprinkled at a favourite place in Ireland, the Cliffs of Moher, Co Clare.

It has been claimed that Jim Morrison would have preferred cremation, and you can see why. His final resting place, the Père-Lachaise cemetery, in Paris, has a long history of disturbance by fans of the Doors’ lead singer, who died aged 27 in 1971. At one point, the grave featured a bust of Morrison, but that was swiped. Over the decades, obsessives have piled the site with trinkets, chipped away at the tombstone and daubed disrespectful graffiti — “This way to Jim” and the like — on nearby graves.

One wet autumn morning in 2005, Susanna Griffie, a 46-year-old American Doors fan, used paper and pastels to obtain a rubbing from Morrison’s gravestone. She did it for her then boyfriend, but, as she explains, “When I came back from Paris, I had the rubbing preserved and framed, but the guy I did it for stood me up and wouldn’t accept the gift.”

Griffie then decided to sell the rubbing as a limited-edition series of prints, “because I just wanted to share this thing with other people who would appreciate it”. Her website, JDMRubbings.com , offers an individually numbered “James Douglas Morrison” print for $418, including shipping to the UK. The singer’s surname is underneath his first name on the rubbing, but that’s simply because the French paper Griffie bought was too narrow for the gravestone.

A much more shocking conjunction of music, death and art was on the cards recently when the Berlin-based artist Natascha Stellmach announced that she would polish off her latest exhibition by smoking the ashes of Kurt Cobain in a spliff. It had been reported back in June that the Nirvana singer’s remains had been purloined from the LA home of his widow, Courtney Love. A spokesman for Love now says that it was all a mistake, and that the ashes were never stolen in the first place.

“My work revolves around identity,” Stellmach has claimed. Whatever she puffed on as the climax to her show, it was unlikely to have been the remains of the god of grunge.

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