January 1st, 1967: The Doors race out of the starting blocks with Break On Through (To The Other Side) - a lean two-and-a-half-minute manifesto that tells you everything that you need to know about the mindset of the group; where they are in that moment and where they are going.

Four and a half years later Riders On The Storm - the last song on the band’s final studio album as a quartet – ends with Ray Manzarek’s jazzy piano chords deconstructing in a random scatter of sparkling minor keys, before dissolving altogether into the distant rumble of thunder and the soft patter of rain.

To family, friends and fans, the death of Doors’s frontman - Jim Morrison – was both tragic and unexpected. Regarded purely from the perspective of creating an enduring artistic legacy the self-styled Lizard King's early bath was remarkably timely. Seldom have a pair of songs bookended a body of work so perfectly.

The final song by a band or a singer can add poignancy to a career, summing-up what has gone before; maybe even going so far as to present previously overlooked past efforts in a new light.

David Bowie has kept a relatively low profile since the release of Reality in 2003. Should this album be the Dame’s last broadcast to the world, then its low-key coda - Bring Me the Disco King - will be a suitably enigmatic signing-off. Haunted, obtuse and downbeat, it lingers for almost eight minutes, never achieving sufficient momentum to lift itself out of the doldrums.

“Don't let me know when you're opening the door, stab me in the dark, let me disappear,” he croons, like a weary jazz singer at the close of a long set, hinting that whatever transformation he undergoes next will take place away from the spotlight.

Steely Dan’s provisional swansong - Everything Must Go - casts the band as a top-heavy corporation fallen on hard times and mired in the anachronisms of the Mad Men era, resolving to end it all “in pool of margaritas”. Even at the peak of their success Donald Fagen and Walter Becker cultivated a dual persona that was behind the times and out of step with the world. If this song stands as their joint retirement speech then it’s a good note to go out on.

Some bands reach a creative cul-de-sac from which the only options are either a slow fade or a complete reinvention. Talk Talk spent the latter half of their career meticulously dismantling the radio-friendly gloss of their early hits, cutting away any extraneous production and instrumentation in favour of a painstakingly assembled minimalism. Runeii - their cryptic farewell - ventures into soundtrack territory - guitar-based ambiance, some murmuring piano and the barely present moan of vocalist Mark Hollis. The only way forward from here was to get quieter. Something that Hollis attempted on his eponymous solo album – a collection of songs so ephemeral and understated that they hardly seem to exist at all.

It’s easier to plan for the end when you have an inkling that it might be coming: What Became of the Likely Lads was The Libertines’ premature bid at mythologizing a song-writing partnership that hadn’t really achieved enough to merit legendary status.

More successful was Nirvana’s All Apologies where Kurt Cobain sounds like a man reciting his own eulogy.

Fellow grunge luminary, Steven Jesse Bernstein, recorded the poems that were to feature on the album - Prison - a few months before his suicide:

“Doesn’t it hurt looking down the sidewalk at night? If that mountain falls on me it’s going to fall on you too.” he rants in No No Man (part 2). You can hear the resentment in his voice - a beaten man with nothing left to lose taking a parting swing at the world.

Freddie Mercury maintained a flamboyant stage persona to the end – his curtain call The Show Must Go On one final rage against the dying light. The vocal was recorded by the critically ill singer in a solitary take, following a slug of vodka and a defiant “I’ll fucking do it Darling.” It went on to become the final track on the Queen album Innuendo and the last single to be released by the group before Mercury’s death.

Not all endings are quite so choreographed or as poetic. The Grateful Dead spent three decades traversing North America, exploring the continent’s rich tapestry of musical styles, their own chemically altered headspace, the sonic possibilities of the studio, and their itinerant fan’s tolerance for lengthy onstage jams. It’s unfortunate that the group’s final studio album should end on such a cloying, unadventurous note - a saccharine lullaby titled I Will Take You Home with lyrics that would make a Care Bear vomit and Barney the Dinosaur jam pencils into his ears. While there is something pleasingly cyclical about a band who had covered so much ground finishing-up back at home, singing one of their children to sleep, none of this can negate the sheer awfulness of the song. A psychedelic blowout incorporating elements of Shady Grove and John Hardy would surely have been a more appropriate conclusion.

Many artists die leaving their final works unfinished, and dependant on their executors’ good judgement to bring their careers to a dignified end. Tupac Shakur’s last words have been eked-out over a series of posthumously released albums – a prolonged Shakespearean death scene that will continue this year with the appropriately titled: Shakurspeare.

Also enjoying a posthumous career is Johnny Cash whose new LP - Ain’t No Grave is billed as the Man in Black’s final studio album. He bows out, not as you might expect, on the back of some dusty trial song, or with a note of world-weary biblical repentance. Instead the album closes with him drifting away to the plodding Hawaiian strains of Aloha Oe. It’s like watching an old Western movie where rather than riding off into the sunset at the end, the grizzled gunfighter retires to a tropical island and enjoys a bronzed, equatorial dotage, watching the sun rise and set time after time, against a languid backdrop of pineapple plantations and swaying palm trees.