September 19, 2025

Come Bye 2025: Hits And Misses

Come Bye is a 400-person festival held at Three Pools, a permaculture farm and event space founded in 2017 near Abergavenny in Wales. I had heard about the festival before from friends and watched the video of last year’s annual Miss Come Bye competition, the highlight of the weekend’s packed schedule of somewhat cultish non-music activities. This year I was invited to play as part of a Magic Carpet showcase on Thursday night and, following the highs and lows of Kala (here), Waking Life (here), Honcho Campout (here) and Dimensions, I was curious to see what kind of note Come Bye would leave me on as I entered the now all-too-familiar “post-partygirl summer” lull.

As a child of 90s Britain, the words “come bye” instantly conjure visions of the television show One Man And His Dog, a competition to find the best shepherd + sheepdog duo in the UK & Ireland. In sheepdog training, “come bye” is the alliterative instruction the shepherd gives for their dog to move in a clockwise direction around the herd of sheep, as opposed to “away” for anticlockwise. I just looked up the show again on youtube and, uh, it’s really something. If middle-aged men saying things like “…and then from County Tipperary we’ve got John Brennan, and he’s got a red and white bitch, and she’s a little smasher, she is” is your thing, dig in to this episode from 1999.

Anyway, I was expecting that level of bucolic realness from my weekend on the farm. And it delivered.

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HIT: Arriving early

Thanks to limited flight options, I arrived the night before the official opening day, so I got to experience, vicariously, that exciting pre-festival moment when the members of the team have done most of the preparatory work and are luxuriating in the double sensation of one job well done (the build) and another job just about to get started (the festival). For some that meant having drinks and putting the finishing touches to their medieval outfits for this year’s theme of ‘Ye Olde Come Bye’; for others, it just meant an early night. I took the latter option and headed to my bell tent, set up in an as yet blissfully empty camping field.

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MISS: Everyone else arriving

I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I feel a deep sense of loss every time I’m at a party early, or a festival, and then other people start showing up. At least when it’s Honcho Campout I am there early because I am working, so I can console myself with the fact that my work would be pointless were it not for the paying guests actually arriving on the Wednesday. But at Come Bye I wasn’t even working on the build, I just happened to be there early, on a bit of a jolly. So as Thursday morning wore on and the last bits of detritus from the build were cleared away and the final staff lunch was served and, without me really realising it at first, actual PUNTERS started arriving and setting up their tents in MY campsite and sitting on MY armchairs and making noise on MY previously tranquil farm…yes, I felt some resentment.

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HIT: The Come Bye HQ

Of course I’m being dramatic. They weren’t in any way my campsite, my armchairs or my farm. And I was also shielded from most of the arrival action because I spent most of Thursday daytime installed in the Come Bye nerve centre aka festival office situated directly above one of the main stages, The Sleeve. I had my day job work to do, and the festival team very kindly ceded desk space for me to do it.

This turned out to be one of my favourite aspects of the long weekend: occupying the same space as the staff without actually having any responsibility myself. Occasionally I’d ask a passing team member questions about what they were doing, or cast a professional-looking eye over the schedule board as if I had any idea what was going on. I’d listen in on conversations about cars getting stuck in the mud in the car park, or a missing shipment of Come Bye branded mugs. I witnessed the ongoing struggles with the power in The Sleeve cutting out every time someone used the kettle. Nevertheless, if tea was offered, I’d accept it, and if it was raining during mealtimes I’d take advantage of my office privileges to eat indoors. By the end of the weekend I was even directing enquiring festival-goers to the mountain of lost and found as if that was actually my job. Whether the actual festival staff using the space found my presence beneficial or merely tolerable would probably depend on who you asked, but I absolutely loved it.

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HIT: The Treebog

The main toilets for the campsite at Three Pools take the form of a raised wooden cabin with three cubicles, one of which contains a helpful sign explaining that it is a ‘Treebog’ — a managed cesspit-slash-compost-heap surrounded by nutrient-hungry willow trees that break down the human waste without any additional management. Generous ventilation keeps the smells to a minimum and the willow wood can be harvested for other uses around the farm. Smart!

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HIT: The scenography

For a tiny festival, they really go ham on the decor. The grounds and existing stone walls were enhanced with various castle-like structures, battlements and so on. A set of stocks were set up near the house. Medieval-looking flags and banners and bunting and candlesticks and insignia of all sorts were everywhere. I know fancy dress isn’t everyone’s thing — it isn’t really mine — but it was really fun seeing the lengths some people had gone to with their outfits, especially when placed in such a carefully thought out, if still very silly, setting. I helped a bit with the break-down after the festival had finished on Monday and I have to give props to the production team for the amount of work they put into crafting this immersive environment.

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MISS: Ella Knight cancelling

I was meant to be playing from 10pm to midnight on Thursday before a closing set from Ella Knight. While I was working in the HQ that morning I overheard a phone call that suggested Ella wouldn’t make it, and indeed it was then confirmed that she was too poorly to come all the way to Wales. I had been excited to play some straight-up house music to warm up for her, so this put a bit of a dampener on that plan.

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HIT: Ella Knight cancelling

As it turned out, Ella cancelling meant all the sets got shifted up and I got given the closing slot. I love closing a stage, so although it meant changing my gameplan a bit, I was quietly pretty happy about it.

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MISS: The weather

Well, apart from a couple of miraculous dry spells (more on those below), it pissed it down all weekend. It was also colder than I’d expected, so it took all of the layers I’d brought just to stay warm on the first couple of nights.

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HIT: The Welsh Men’s Choir

I had been told I absolutely must not miss Synergy, a men’s close-harmony choir from nearby Abergavenny who perform at the festival every year. So at 7.45pm I duly went over to the Wellness tent to get a seat in what turned out to be a packed house. The choir filed in — around twenty men from their 30s to their 70s, all wearing identical Synergy-branded outdoor jackets, many of whom looked like they could well have been contestants on One Man And His Dog. Their setlist featured show tunes, love songs, ‘Africa’ by Toto (a crowd favourite), a rendition of happy birthday for a Come Bye regular and, curveball, a song from Toy Story. The audience, including me, was utterly enraptured. They got multiple ovations and requests for encores. Thinking strategically, I ducked out during their encore to beat the queue for dinner, which I do slightly regret since they were so brilliant, but which my stomach thanked me for afterwards.

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HIT: The Three Pools grill

There were a few different food options on site but to be honest I only had eyes for the venue’s own grill: burgers and wraps and breakfast baps containing meat and veg grown right there on the farm. On Friday and Saturday there were special dinners too, a chicken tagine and a pulled pork feijoada, both absolutely delicious. But it was the breakfast bap I had on Sunday morning, after missing morning service the first two days, that provided my top food moment of the weekend.

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MISS: The Dutchie layout on Thursday night

For a tiny festival, Come Bye sure does have plenty of stages. Indoors there are the two main rooms, The Dutchie and The Sleeve, plus a bonus Rave Cave with room for about 30 people (but often seemingly packed with around 40). Out in the gardens there’s the chill/ambient tent curated and run by an external collective, Umbilical Chords, and the Mikata tent that hosted some music and things like the Cabaret show and Miss Come Bye competition. Then the Wellness tent featured a mix of music, talks, wellness stuff and, uh, musical theatre. There were further happenings around the site — like the sock off, pool noodle jousting and woodland karaoke — some announced and some not.

Of the two main indoor music stages, The Sleeve was for sure the better one, with a low ceiling, two entrances on either side of the room to help with crowd circulation, and a Void sound system far more powerful than it has any business of being in a space that small. The Dutchie, by contrast, was a much bigger room with a mezzanine level and only one entrance, making it a challenge both acoustically and logistically. This room was intended for live bands as well as DJs, so on the Thursday night they had set it up with the band equipment cordoned off at one end of the room and the DJ booth in the middle. It was a bit of a disaster. The sound wasn’t great, the sweet spot somehow ending up behind the DJ booth so that people congregated there rather than in front. The monitoring was clearly an issue and I’m not sure anyone dared to try playing vinyl in there. Luckily I was on the lineup in The Sleeve that night, so I didn’t have to worry about it, but I felt bad for the DJs who did.

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HIT: Playing in The Sleeve

I won’t go into detail on my set, but safe to say after I’d got the first 30-40 minutes of semi-obligatory tech house out of the way I managed to relax and start really enjoying myself. Apart from a slightly distracting delay that I’m still not sure was real or simply in my head, the setup was great and everything went smoothly. By the time it came to the final half an hour or so I was three Palomas deep and ready to roll out the classics: Adina Howard, Usher, and Prince to finish. Then I was in bed by 3am.

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HIT: The Three Pools farm tour

On Friday afternoon, during one of those miraculous breaks in the downpours, I joined a scheduled tour round the farm with its founder, Huw. Unlike the contestants on One Man And His Dog, most of whom it seems were born into farming or took it up in retirement, Huw is a city boy who took a degree in Land Engineering and decided, in his mid 20s, to buy the Three Pools farm with absolutely no prior experience of actual farming. He was a charmingly deadpan tour guide, giving the superficial impression of someone muddling through this whole farming business, though frequently undermining that image by dropping sick ecological facts on us, like the fact that a pig uterus has two ‘horns’ or wings in which the foetuses develop, or explaining the precise impact this year’s drought has had on hay production and its consequences. We had many questions about his relationship with the neighbouring farmers, and he told us many of them were initially sceptical about his permaculture methods, but have since thawed a bit on seeing the benefits those methods bring to the land. I’m sure most of us wished the tour was twice as long.

A funny parallel: the first contestant in that episode of One Man And His Dog, in County Tipperary, introduces his farmland by recounting a fable of how the devil took a chunk out of a nearby mountain, lending it its name the ‘Devil’s Bit’. On the tour around Three Pools, Huw told an almost identical story about the landslips on nearby Skirrid mountain, known as the ‘Devil’s Table’. The thinking around farming techniques may have evolved over the decades, but the countryside lore remains much the same.

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HIT: Sock wrestling

The first non-music activity I witnessed was the annual ‘Sock Off’ tournament on Friday afternoon. In sock wrestling, you face off against an opponent with the sole objective of removing one of their socks before they remove one of yours. The knockout format was brutal, leaving two titans of the sport in the hotly contested final. It was grassy and muddy and inelegant — and hilarious.

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HIT: The Rooted Revelry Cabaret

Before getting stuck into the music on Friday night, I attended the cabaret show in the outdoor Mikata tent, highlights of which included a grotesque pubic-hair-reveal bit to ‘Lovin’ You’ by Minnie Riperton and a version of ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ that paid homage to the classic ’Working As A Waitress In A Cocktail Bar’, never once progressing past that iconic opening line: “Where have all the good men gone?”

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HIT: Jorg Kuning @ The Dutchie on Friday night

I guess the good thing about a small festival like this is that you can adapt on the fly, and full props to the tech team for listening to the feedback from Thursday and doing something about the layout in The Dutchie. By Friday night, when Jorg Kuning was going to play his liveset, the entire setup had been changed, with the DJ booth returned to behind the main speaker stacks and Jorg’s table just behind that. When we went in soon after he had started it was like it was a different sound system, punchy and clear. Jorg was, of course, fantastic, his music effortlessly encapsulating the oddball élan of the festival as a whole.

It’s entirely appropriate, then, that he should have become the darling of Come Bye, but unfortunately it also meant the room got so packed we couldn’t move, so we had to go up to the mezzanine to enjoy the rest of his set from above. Amid the hits there were some excellent tunes I hadn’t heard before and he kept the energy high throughout. He closed with ‘Mercedes’, which I reviewed here and still sounds to me like his own personal take on ‘New Age Of Faith’.

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MISS: Ditching the dancefloor…

I enjoyed some of the bouncier garagey stuff Shanti Celeste played in the first part of her set after Jorg, but by this point my dancing legs had all but forsaken me and The Dutchie was still too packed to the gills to really relax on the dancefloor. I dipped into Onur Özer in The Sleeve but found I couldn’t accept the proposition of often very flamboyant 80s-inflected acid house records being played in a completely un-flamboyant manner. Don’t ask me to explain it any better than that because I can’t. It just fell flat for me. That’s how I ended up in the Umbilical Chords and then bed, but it also meant that I missed that night’s remaining programme of Dr Banana, Chez De Milo and Tho, all of whom I’m sure would have been worth a listen.

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HIT: …but finding the Umbilical Chords

So my first experience of the Umbilical Chords stage was on my way to bed on Friday night, when I decided to take a closer look at this geodesic dome partly out of basic curiosity and partly as advance research for my closing set in there on Sunday morning. Suspended from the inside of the dome are four large army-grade parachutes in varying shades of pink, evoking uncannily the fleshy interior folds of a womb. The cord itself is an extruded cushion that winds sinuously across the floor of the dome, supplemented with large bean bags and pillows. The custom soundsystem consists of beautiful wooden cases with turquoise features. A smoke machine periodically fumigates the room rather noisily (surely a hazer would be better?), adding to the mystic vibes inside and, from the outside, making it look like the dome is cooking slowly in its own amniotic juices.

When I popped my head in around 1am, I immediately caught sight of my friends S & M (or M & S, whichever you prefer), who gestured for me to join them on the floor. I took my shoes off and entered the fold(s). A man was wearing a candlestick on his head and K was being handed out on a trowel. Over the ensuing 90 minutes I had conversations about Cluedo, a cucumber, Santa Claus Land in Ohio, Arthur Russell, and the different versions of ‘All Is Full Of Love’. I made an obscene joke about the cucumber to some strangers and spent the next 15 minutes kettily regretting it. The DJ played the Mark Barrott remix of ‘Head Over Heels’. A random guy called Jimmy somehow had me listen to his extended thoughts on love, moral boundaries and the umbilical cord as a symbol for revolutionary action for I don’t know how long. I spent most of this largely one-way conversation toying with a giant glowstick and reflecting on why I always let this happen to me.

The rain came down in sheets outside but from inside it was very difficult to tell if it was still going or had stopped, we were so ensconced. I did take advantage of a brief pause in the deluge to go on a mission to the toilets, where it became apparent a horde of hornets had invaded the usual tranquility of the Treebog, so I had to kill a couple of these monsters before doing my business and beating a hasty retreat back to the safety of the womb. The DJ ended their set with Broadcast’s ‘Echo's Answer’ — or at least I think it was that song, we were still very ketty at this point — so I was able tell, for the nth time, to anyone who would listen, my Trish Keenan anecdote (I saw Broadcast perform at The Custard Factory when I was 17). I finally hauled myself off to bed around 4am, feeling like I’d been thoroughly umbilicalled. I was looking forward to my closing set on Sunday morning.

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HIT: Miss Come Bye 2025

I’m not going to give an in-depth review of the whole Miss Come Bye competition, but just to say it’s a beautiful thing seeing an entire festival crowd come together for two hours to celebrate people being as silly as they possibly can be. The right person (Billy Elliot) won, and the sun shone throughout — a heavenly blessing that apparently occurs every year, no matter how dreadful the weather is otherwise.

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HIT: The Conspiracy Power Hour

Hot on the heels of Miss Come Bye, over at the Wellness tent, I attended the intriguingly titled ‘Conspiracy Power Hour’, in which any member of the audience could get up on stage and share their deepest suspicions about the hidden workings of the world aka conspiracy theories. During each speech, the two hosts of the segment would fashion a tinfoil hat on the speaker’s head in realtime. It was a riot, especially when one speaker in full Diana Spencer drag took the mic and began to list every suspicious fact about the people’s princess’s untimely demise. I was on the verge of offering to share my long-held conspiracy theory about Hercule Poirot but couldn’t quite pluck up the courage. Maybe next year?

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HIT: Dora plays ‘Silhouette’

We’ve been waiting patiently for years, and finally it’s happening: Delta Funktionen’s 2010 tune ‘Silhouette’ is having its revival. Kia played it at Dimensions at the Olive Grove on Friday night, which had me scrambling for my phone to capture the video evidence for my friend Bleimann. And then Dora played it at Come Bye, in The Sleeve on Saturday evening. I predict a Silhouette Summer for 2026.

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HIT/MISS: Grand Designs The Musical: The First Chapter

This had been talked up all weekend and while it didn’t disappoint, it was also a bit of a hot mess. The final (prequel) chapter of a four-year run, this episode of Grand Designs The Musical gave us the Kevin McCloud origin story. Just how and why did he end up so embittered despite his astronomical success in the reality TV home improvement sector? Unfortunately the person playing Kevin had been very sick for days leading up to the performance so had had absolutely no time to learn the script. He did admirably considering. The slimy TV exec was my personal favourite character, but to be honest I was lost for most of the performance, and I don’t think it was only because I’d missed the previous year’s episodes. I kind of loved the chaos, but also felt like it all fell just a bit short on the night.

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HIT/MISS: The Rave Cave on Saturday night

Another conflicted one, this. The Rave Cave is a tiny room that you access through a kind of TARDIS-like vestibule leading off the chill area next to The Sleeve. I first visited on Thursday evening and enjoyed the grimey UKG Hari Naylor was playing from inside the medieval jail-like wooden cage of the booth. The sound was surprisingly good. It was the lighting that was my real issue: two giant disco balls spinning on overdrive, with spotlights flashing alternate colours directly at them creating a maelstrom of bright light spots flying in all directions. I needed sunglasses and I didn’t have any. Further, like I mentioned earlier, the Rave Cave has room for about 30 people but often had many more, making it very difficult to dance. On Saturday night both FCE and The Darrs were playing sick tunes in there but it was almost impossible to stay comfortable in the throng. And the lights were still overwhelming. (I know that’s the point!)

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MISS: Not rolling through Saturday night

Are we noticing a theme here? Once again, even though it had occurred to me to hit the hard stuff and roll through to my Sunday morning set in the Umbilical Chords, I crashed out early. I was enjoying the tunes Wallace and Come Bye’s Head Herder aka Max Hagenbach were playing in The Sleeve — including ‘A Dedication To Joss’, which is obviously always welcome — and it’s been years since I saw nd_baumecker play, so I was tempted to make a go for it and stay up till dawn. But the dancefloors were too busy and my body and soul were saturated from all the day’s activities. I guess I’m getting old. I went back to the bell tent around midnight so that I could get up in good time for Rêyzen’s set in the Umbilical Chords at 8am, before my own at 10am.

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HIT: Zoning out to Rêyzen’s set

When I arrived at the womb-dome in the morning there was still a strong crack-on crew going strong. It was a good sign. Rather than joining any particular group, I found a good spot on the umbilical cushion and lay down with my eyes closed, half drifting off as Rêyzen played from ambient to downtempo. It was an excellent way to start the day, interrupted only by…

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HIT: The Breakfast bap I ate before my Umbilical Chords set

I know I’ve mentioned it already, but I’m mentioning it again here because it was just so fucking good. I wish I could eat one of these breakfast baps every morning for the rest of my life.

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MISS: The audience for my Umbilical Chords set

Unfortunately, by the time I took over from Rêyzen at 10am, the UC crowd had thinned considerably, consisting now of only about ten stalwart seshers. And even they didn’t last longer than the first 20 minutes or so of my selections. The floor was littered with empties and discarded drug paraphernalia and in the light of day the distended umbilical cord and parachute canopy looked far less vibesy than they had done on Friday night. One of the speaker stacks simply was’t working and I couldn’t seem to adjust the monitor volume. I had prepared all sorts of fun ideas for this slot, imagining the roll-through crew reacting to some curveballs and slowjams or whatever, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

There was some respite. Just as the last stragglers were getting up to leave the dome, I put on ‘Ghosts’ by Japan, and that was enough to keep one of the final crack-on crew with me. We had a good laugh together over the following half an hour or so. Another friend showed up with dates, pistachio nuts, incense and a beer, which improved the vibe immeasurably. Solitary figures would occasionally pop in to look for property they’d lost in the mass of bodies and pillows that night, though they’d only ever stay for a minute or two. One guy came in and sat down, and then a few minutes later got up again to exclaim that someone had stolen his shoes. At another point two boys came in to find something they’d dropped while making out on a cushion earlier in the morning, and offered us some poppers. That was a highlight. The UC team showed up to fix the dead speaker stack and then looked like they were about to start packing everything away while I was still playing, though thankfully they thought better of it.

Eventually I was left completely alone, so I played a slowjammed version of ‘Naked’ by Louise, purely for my own gratification. On -16 Louise starts to sound a lot like George Michael.

I closed my set with Broadcast’s ‘Tears In The Typing Pool’:

Succumb to the line
The finishing time
The long distance runner
Has stopped on the corner
But I won't give up
Although I've stopped too

Before the end of me and you
The patchwork explains
The land is unchanged

Tu-tu, tu-tu
Tu-tu, tu-tu-ooh

Interpret the rooms
My tears in the typing pool
The letters are sighing
The ink is still drying
I told you the truth
And now I sigh too

The page turns on me and you
Across that white plain
The land is unchanged

Tu-tu, tu-tu
Tu-tu, tu-tu-ooh

It felt highly appropriate.

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HIT: Closing ceremony and sound bath

Come Bye’s stated ethos revolves around the concepts of “gifting, quality music and lots of daftness”, all of which (except maybe the quality music) I believe comes from ‘Burns’. It’s no coincidence that head herder Max is a regular Burning Man attendee. And although nothing about Burning Man gives me the impression that I would enjoy myself there, at this modest festival in rural Wales I found the impact of this simple orientation — encouraging each other to embrace the silly, and especially the idea of giving without an expectation of a return — to be quite profound. A gesture as modest as a stranger handing me a satsuma on leaving the ‘pow wow’ with Come Bye elders on Sunday afternoon, I now see, represents a mutuality and respect that underlies all of the Come Bye experience. It may be unfair to compare events operating on such different scales, but this sense of shared responsibility towards each other and towards the venue and the land feels, to me at least, completely absent from a festival like Dimensions. And maybe that’s why I didn’t feel as alienated at Come Bye as I do at Dimensions, even though the crowd is just as British and, despite the queerness of many of the activities, overall still very straight.

The festival ended early on Sunday evening with a fire ceremony in the rain, including some closing thoughts from Max, and a wonderful sound bath by Rêyzen. During the ceremony we were encouraged to make two offerings to the fire, one for something we would leave behind, and one for something we would take forwards with us after the festival. I’m usually pretty allergic to these kinds of things, but after my immersion in the vibes of the festival all weekend I actually got on board. Consistent with the theme of giving and with the values of the Three Pools farm — sustainability over productivity, making the most of what you’ve got rather than always seeking to acquire more — I decided to let go of ‘possessiveness’. And to take forward with me after the festival I chose ‘honesty’, as that was what I had sensed running through the festival as a whole. If there’s scene politics or cliqueishness happening at Come Bye, I didn’t witness it. If there’s competition for space, I didn’t observe it. What I saw and felt was just a load of people getting the opportunity to express themselves honestly, and supporting others doing the same.

On brand for this Sunday, during the fire ceremony one of the queens who’d run a variety game show called ‘Universally Challenged’ on Saturday night offered me a hit of poppers. The ceremony was a relatively solemn affair but there we were dissolving into giggles. Even that incongruity felt entirely in keeping with the moment. Everyone lay down on the floor of the Wellness tent for Rêyzen’s sound bath. Once again I half drifted off into reverie.