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I received a moderately angry email from a reader, haranguing me along these lines:

“Joe, I was prepared to ignore your lack of organisation over the summer while you were living in a tent, but you’ve now been back over a month, so there’s no excuse for the absence of the round-up of September’s Top Five Bands. Sort it out, idiot; chop chop.“

OK, it wasn’t an email at all, but the shrieking sound of my guilty conscience. So, belatedly, here are September’s best bands in no particular order:

Robert George Saull & The Purgatory Players – We said: “Their songs are sung in a manner suggesting an interest in the quixotic and sung using words that almost have the wrong meaning, but not quite. It is recorded by young men in very normal clothing from the north of England.”

Golau Glau – We said: “A dreamy clatter, hissing angrily and throbbing with monster synth stabs, over vocals that vanish into the swirl.”

Balún – We said: “Balún have realised that technology is only useful if the intent behind that use is carefully measured, and in songs like Minumina have produced small bubbles of quivering delicacy; bubbles ready to burst under the weight of their frivolity.”

Shark? – We? Said?: “Songs like these leave nothing else on which to ponder: superb grimy garage-rock, with the added benefit of 30-odd years’ hindsight.”

And September’s Best New Band is:

Run DMT – We said: “Run DMT are daring, imaginative and downright bizarre. Their songs sound like they were born after some sort of perverse musical DNA-splicing experiments, or if your iPod could separate individual sounds from a million songs and then shuffle-play ten of them at once.”

Run DMT are worthy winners indeed – flexible, awkward and, dare I say it, avant-garde: well worth ten minutes of anyone’s time.

And speaking of time, I promise that the round-up for this month will be published when it should be. Honest gov’nor.