Sound of the underground ... Jem Finer with his installation. Photograph: Roger Bamber
Back in Jem Finer's days with the Pogues, there was nothing unusual about his fans drinking the venue dry. However when everything dried up in the heart of a Kent woodland, it caused the former guitarist a great many more problems. Deer and drought had combined to empty a forest dewpond, which was to be the orchestra pit for Finer's latest composition, Score for a Hole in the Ground.
The first public performance was due yesterday, when water was to trickle from the pond through a pipe, then drip onto tuned discs of polished stainless steel, buried in a deep hole. This in turn was to be amplified by a steel funnel, like the horn from a giant's gramophone. Without water it would have been a silent comedy.
Shiner accepted the inevitable and bought in 10,000 litres, delivered by tractor, at a cost of £400. In the end, pond and hole performed beautifully. The wind and the clatter of cameras drowned out the horn's echo into the treetops, but the sweet eerie notes welled up from the stones and leaves covering the mouth of the well. One listener was poetically reminded of the bells of a drowned cathedral: another thought it sounded like a gift shop selling Balinese wind chimes which had been buried alive.
In 1982, Jeremy "Jem" Finer was a founder member of the Pogues, along with frontman Shane MacGowan. In the band's chaotic heyday no one would have put money on Finer becoming a respected conceptual artist and composer. But last year his proposal scooped the inaugural £50,000 New Music Award. The award is open to anybody, anywhere, for any project covered by the widest conceivable definition of music.
Finer, who spent four years slaving over a hot laptop to create Long Player, a computer generated piece of music designed to play without repetition for 1,000 years - now six years into its working life at a lighthouse in Docklands - describes his hole in the ground as "post-digital".
The piece is in King's Wood, near Challock, where Stour Valley Arts have been creating art installations for the last 10 years. A special exception has been made for Finer's work: all previous sculptures were required to be biodegradable, but they want his to last forever, deer and climate change permitting.
The piece officially opens to the public on Sunday, but yesterday's preview guests were served a picnic lunch of roast venison - an unnecessarily harsh reminder to the forest deer to keep off the art.
