by Damon Albarn getting ready to play at Wembley Stadium would have been pretty cool for most session musicians but it wouldn’t have been great for Barmy Army trumpeter Simon Finch.
“I was thinking I was going to do Wembley Stadium but Damon had one of his hardest days, shall we say and he decided to ditch all the brass at rehearsals and it was a blessing in retrospect because that it conflicted with the Headingley Ashes Test, the comeback. Examination. I think overall Damon did me a favor,” he says.
From Blur to Bazball. Finch has played with some of the biggest names in music at the world’s most famous venues but it’s clear when you ask him what he likes. Is it playing tunes for England fans or playing on the Pyramid of the Pyramid at Glastonbury?
“The Barmy Army is where I get the most satisfaction. 100 percent, it’s off the scale,” he says. “The Edgbaston Test in New Zealand was the first time I made my live debut with the Barmy Army. I don’t usually get nervous playing big gigs. But Before my first Jerusalem I was the most nervous I have been since school. But the immense pride I got from making the first Jerusalem was off the scale. It was the greatest feeling ever when people said ‘nice one Finchy’”.
Finch is a jazz, rock and soul trumpeter who has been playing since the age of 10, who turned professional when he left music college and recruited the Barmy Army in 2021, instead orchestral musician Billy Cooper.
He played with Florence and the Machine when they headlined Glastonbury in 2015, on Blur’s world tour that year which ended with gigs at Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, and was with Liam Gallagher’s ex-Oasis band , Beady Eye, for two years. He played as a session musician for Vampire Weekend, Eric Clapton, Paloma Faith, Tom Jones, Paul Weller and was in the horn section for Beyoncé at the Albert Hall. He provided the trumpet on Kanye West’s smash hit, All The Lights, which helped get the royalties through the Covid period when musicians couldn’t do gigs.
He says there aren’t many music superstars for cricket fans, especially Man City supporters Gallagher. “I took the p— off when I was with Liam’s band. He got wind that I didn’t like football. That didn’t help. Then when we were playing at Glastonbury I was reading a book about the ashes. Liam’s guitarist, Gem Archer, said, “what the f— are you reading for that s—. They were taking the p— out of me for playing cricket.”
Actors are different as he found out on the set of Love Actually when he played the trumpet in the wedding scene at the beginning of the film. “I was sitting behind Colin Firth for a couple of days in the chapel when we shot it in a small church in west London. For some reason one day he came back from lunch with a brand new red Dukes ball in his hand. He wanted to practice before opening the bowling for his local village team.”
There were some disturbancesgo alongs, from the mobs in India to the Barmy Army. Finch’s wife is from India and it helped that he has a connection between Bollywood tunes and local supporters. The Barmy Army is often misunderstood. They are almost all supporters of Test cricket. You rarely see a Barmy Army at whiteball games. The Barmy Army traveling group is small in Ranchi, around 20, but with many more booked for the fifth Test in Dharamsala, swelling the local economy.
Some of the England fans who don’t travel with the Barmy Army – and there are some tour groups here – probably don’t enjoy the noise, especially some of the older supporters, but he says they’ve had no incidents at the grounds these trips.
“The role is to get the fans singing to encourage the team on the pitch. A good analogy is that I’m kind of a conductor and the orchestra is the fans. I hope that will inspire the audience that is the team. I was surprised how few fans had heard of the Barmy army in India but as each Test went on, the fans warmed up to what we do and by the end of the second day we got a lot of selfie requests which were amazing Some of the Indian fans came and sat with us and said they were England fans for the rest of the Test, which made me feel so warm.
He fell in love with cricket while watching the 1989 Ashes (not an easy series for England) and went to his first Test match at the Oval in 2003 when Alec Stewart played his last. “I had to go home to Tooting, yes a trumpeter who lives in Tooting, at the end of the play to change for a gig that night at China White’s where I was playing in a Latino Band, you know playing Gauntanamero and that’s all. Anyway some of the England players came in, my heroes. I couldn’t believe it. One of the group was a bit full and started saying ‘come on mate play the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was like ‘look at us, we have a trumpet, a violin and an acoustic guitar. Not exactly the Red Hot Chili Peppers.’”
Finch’s repertoire while playing for the Barmy Army shows a distinctly British humour. He plays the theme from Bullseye when a player or team reaches fifty, Enter the Gladiator (the juggling song) if an opponent drops a catch and the theme to Only Fools and Horses as “we are sitting in the sun and only fools and yes horses at work.”
With the Barmy Army, Finch’s job is to entertain the crowd but he can also be there to manage situations, noting that some of them can be a little too bold and lighten things up with gusto. “The job description is to be a polite guy. If it takes a few fires here and there with the crowds, so be it. I love doing that because it makes people realize that we’re not too tribal. When you’re on the road as a musician you chat with other musicians and other things but now I’m in a group with people from all over the world and we have one common love: cricket. It is brilliant.”
