In 1982 Sun Ra, far-out legend of cosmic jazz,  signed to Y Records - the British home to post-punk agitators The Slits, Shriekback, The Pop Group and Glaxo Babies - hoping to reorient the trajectory of a career that had always been aimied at the Sun.

This was the result, a track which slouches along like something suffering from advanced radiation sickness, but there's a muddy groove churning  away beneath. The album 'Nuclear War' was only ever released in Italy,  but you can see why Y might have looked like a happy home for Ra, who was always reaching for the next new thing. What's harder to understand is why he thought - as he did - that this might be a hit. Or even get played on the radio. "Nuclear War," runs the full extent of the lyric. "It' a motherfucker/Don't you know/If they push that button, your ass gotta go/And whatcha gonna do/Without your ass?"

The first of today's installments is Hawkwind's public service broadcast parody Sonic Attack, written by novelist Michael Moorcock. Moorcock himself is a fascinating character and, uniquely in British writing, I think, straddles the grimy countercultural underground and the literary establishment. "You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting, or even laughter," intones resident poet Bob Calvert here, while a young Lemmy gurgles in the background.  "Do not panic." (Tricky to locate footage of this track on YouTube, so below is a video mash-up by Omptaphobai.)

Regular visitors to this blog  will need no introduction to our abiding obsession with early Hawkwind: pre-punk, fug-rock dirges with added whooshing sounds, made by people who walked it like they talked it.  Sadly, original guitarist Huw Lloyd Langton died this week. The Independent pays tribute here, and below is the lilting buskers' anthem Hurry On Sundown, which still gets the odd spin round here on balmy summer evenings.

Here's Werner Herzog's 1979 film Nosferatu The Vampyre, in which Klaus Kinski's tortured Dracula longs for the merciful release of death. For the purposes of this playlist, the important bit comes at the end of the film. As plague ravages the small German town of Wismar, the people stage their own last supper: a vast, municipal meal laid out in the square. As deathly couples waltz woozily across the cobbles, the rats come swarming in to devour the food. It's a beautifully choreographed, eerie and feverish moment; swelling in the background is Popul Vuh's Bruder Des Schattens ('brothers of darkness') - a Gregorian chant rising right out of the sewers.

After that, Werner Herzog's documentary about his relationship with the human apocalypse that was Klaus Kinski, 'My Best Fiend.' "He had a diabolical character!" says Herzog of Kinski, looking like a man who's had a gun pulled on him once or twice. Or three times. "He was not normal!"

It's already been suggested that this playlist has lost its focus. "Listen, pal. This is just a random bunch of stuff you happen to like."  Well. We're pulling it right back on track with this magnificently hypnotic account of rising pyrocumulus from Can's Tago Mago. 

That's followed by Mother Sky in all its epic entirety. If you only listen to one 15 minute-long piece of cosmic krautrock in the next 11 days, it should probably be this one.  And if that is your current listening policy, we think you should rethink it.

Culture's magnificent 1977 album Two Sevens Clash was inspired by a vision the band had that the world would end on 7/7/77.  That didn't happen, though the apocalyptic vibrations which animated 1970s roots and dub cemented punk's alliance with the reggae. (We'll be getting more deeply into this later.)  Thereafter, Horace Andy's End of the World.  Seven. It's a mysterious number.

Prince takes us up to the last party. Kode 9 and Spaceape take us down and out.

I know what you're thinking: this playlist, right, it's all going to be patchouli and mist and spotlit silhouettes -  we know how you roll. Well, there may be a certain amount of that.  But the Sisters of Mercy get a spot of their own because (a) this is the sort of fabulously plotless video Michelangelo Antonioni may have made, had he grown up listening to Suicide and (b) goth came to life under the shadow of the bomb.

Martin Amis' essay Introducing Thinkability in Einstein's Monsters catches the dimorphic narcissism and logicless logic which characterised the final miles of the nuclear arms race.  Nuclear weapons are the problem. What's the answer? It's  nuclear weapons. The Cold War, like all wars, made weird things appear to make sense, but the bomb is the ultimate vanity project - one whose workability will only ever be tested when it's actually put in to play. At which point it will, by definition, have failed.

For a magnificent analysis of the political, scientific, military and cultural impact of the bomb, we recommend Gerard De Groot's grimly compelling biography The Bomb -  A Life, which even features Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons'  threat to detonate a stolen 10 megatonner over Springfield unless all TV is eliminated - an odd little parody of the golden age of nuclear paranoia.

My own favourite assessment of nuclear deterrence comes from Carl Sagan - not all whose views we share - but whose formulation in this respect is vividly perfect: "The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." Irony - alongside impotence and unending dread - have been the principle characteristics of the nuclear age. The Sisters knew where the wind was blowing...

YouTube is awash with apoca-porn: millenarian mash-ups which marry the gravitas of MTV with the musical instincts of 5 News. Quite a lot of them feature this late-life reflection on Revelation by the Man in Black, which opened Zack Snyder's 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and was listed 296th best song of the 2000s (by Pitchfork).  That means there are at least 295 songs released in that decade alone which are better than this one. Imagine that.

Also today, via our favourite purveyors of high-fallutin' contrarianism Verso Books, Slavoj Zizek's documentary Living In The End Times in its entirety. We recently got through Zizek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce - a possibly playful bit of polemic which seeks to rebrand Communism, I think, by dropping the utopian-idealogical elements. But to be honest it's hard to tell 'cos I could only understand three pages out of every five.  From there we got into Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I've actually had to put a sign up in the newsagent's asking for local help and support with that one.

The world has been ending since the start of recorded history, and probably on a fairly regular basis before that.

Zarathustra was the first not to start making long-terms plans, somewhere around 1,200 BCE in modern Iran. More than 200 specific dates for the Great Reckoning have been posited over the last two millennia. There were around 100 confident predictions of the end of the world in the twentieth century alone, though anyone who lived through the industrial conflicts of the last 100 years may feel that, in every meaningful sense, the world did actually end in 1914, again in 1940, again in 1945 and on a weekly basis thereafter.

In his book Apocalypse: A History of the End of Time, John Michael Greer chronicles the viral life of the apocalypse meme in the run up to 21 December 2012, which may or may not be the point at which the Mayan calendar comes to an end and there are no more days to count.

In fact, says Greer, there is scant evidence to suggest that this date has ever been of any significance whatsoever to ancient Mesoamerican cultures – or to anyone else. Just one reference to it was found in a minor Mayan temple and no one's quite sure how the numbers there work out anyway.

We do, nevertheless, recognise the perversely seductive appeal of apocalyptic thinking round here. Imminent cataclysm introduces a fairly acute sense of drama. ('Catharsis' - purification through tragedy – shares with 'cataclysm' the Ancient Greek root 'kataklysmos' – a washing away of things).

Acceding to the apocalyptic meme makes the adept feel exclusive, elect, terrible and significant. Heroes come forth in the wasteland. And after the apocalypse there's the whole Mad Max, po-ap thing: a literal leveling of the social order with, in the movies anyway, a bizarrely carnivalesque undertone. ('Carnival', which has the same Latin root as 'carnage': a removal of flesh or meat.)

In fact, of course, the world – and the rest of the universe - will probably conclude with the heat death of the Sun in around four billion years' time. We're unlikely to be here to see that. But it does introduce some helpful perspective.

Anyway, to celebrate the fact that the world is not going to end in three weeks' time, we are assembling the Apocalypse Playlist: 20 songs about the end of the world at the rate of one (or possibly two) a day, until we get to 21/12/12.

I'm not sure how this list is going to pan out yet, though I can guarantee that neither REM nor Europe will feature. We begin however, by missing the point slightly. 2112 by Canadian geek metallers Rush is actually about the year 2112, rather than the date 21 December. Drummer and writer Neil Peart claimed inspiration from the ever-controversial objectivist writer Ayn Rand, whose celebration of selfishness – or more accurately, her notion that only by being selfish can one be true to oneself – does have the sort of apocalyptic grandeur survivalist's love.

In the late 1970s that reference to Rand got Rush branded right-wing extremists, which they weren't. But that's just the sort of thing that can happen if you let your drummer write your lyrics. (Crap drummer jokes have a separate entry.)