Jem Finer
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Jeremy Max Finer (born 20 July 1955) is an English musician, artist and composer. He was one of the founding members of
The Pogues The Pogues were an English or Anglo-Irish Celtic punk band fronted by Shane MacGowan and others, founded in Kings Cross, London in 1982, as "Pogue Mahone" – the anglicisation of the Irish Gaelic ''póg mo thóin'', meaning "kiss my arse". T ...
.


Life and career

Finer was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England, the son of political scientist
Samuel Finer Samuel Edward Finer FBA (22 September 1915 – 9 June 1993) was a British political scientist and historian specializing in comparative politics, who was instrumental in advancing political studies as an academic subject in the United Kingdom ...
. He took a joint degree in computing and sociology at
Keele University Keele University, officially known as the University of Keele, is a public research university in Keele, approximately from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as the University College of North Staffordshire, Keele ...
. After college, he travelled around Europe and spent some time working on a barge in France. He settled in London, where he met
Shane MacGowan Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan (born 25 December 1957) is an Irish singer, songwriter, and musician. He is best known as the lead singer and songwriter of Celtic punk band the Pogues. He was also a member of the Nipple Erectors and Shane MacGo ...
,
Spider Stacy Peter Richard "Spider" Stacy (born 14 December 1958, Eastbourne) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, and actor. He is best known for playing tin whistle and sometimes singing for The Pogues. Early life Stacy left school at 16 after fa ...
, and
James Fearnley James Fearnley (born 9 October 1954, Worsley) is an English musician. He played accordion in the Celtic punk band The Pogues. Life and career As a child he was a choir treble before his voice changed at the age of sixteen. He took piano less ...
with whom he founded
The Pogues The Pogues were an English or Anglo-Irish Celtic punk band fronted by Shane MacGowan and others, founded in Kings Cross, London in 1982, as "Pogue Mahone" – the anglicisation of the Irish Gaelic ''póg mo thóin'', meaning "kiss my arse". T ...
. He has worked in a variety of fields, including photography, film, experimental and popular music and installation. Primarily a
banjo The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashi ...
ist with the Pogues, he occasionally played other instruments including
mandola The mandola (US and Canada) or tenor mandola (Ireland and UK) is a fretted, stringed musical instrument. It is to the mandolin what the viola is to the violin: the four double courses of strings tuned in fifths to the same pitches as the viola ...
, saxophone,
hurdy-gurdy The hurdy-gurdy is a string instrument that produces sound by a hand-crank-turned, rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to those of a vio ...
and the guitar. Apart from MacGowan (with whom he co-wrote several songs, including "
Fairytale of New York "Fairytale of New York" is a song written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan and recorded by their London-based band the Pogues, featuring singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl on vocals. The song is an Irish folk-style ballad and was written as a du ...
"), Finer was the most prolific composer for the band. He appeared on all the band's albums until their breakup in 1996; he was one of only three original members. During that time he also appeared on MacGowan's solo album '' The Snake'' and
The Levellers The Levellers were a political movement active during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms who were committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance. The hallmark of Leveller thought was its popul ...
' self-titled release; he continued working as a musician and composer after leaving The Pogues. On 1 January 2000, the Finer-composed
Longplayer ''Longplayer'' is a self-extending composition by British composer and musician Jem Finer which is designed to continue for one thousand years. It started to play at midnight on 1 January 2000, and if all goes as planned, it will continue w ...
piece of music was started; this is designed to last 1000 years without ever repeating itself, and as currently implemented exists in both computer-generated and live versions. Longplayer represents a convergence of many of his concerns, particularly those relating to systems, long-durational processes and extremes of scale in both time and space. Finer was "Artist in Residence" at the Astrophysics Sub-department of the
University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...
between October 2003 and June 2005, making a number of works including two sculptural observatories, Landscope and The Centre of the Universe. Finer and Hamburg-based
swamp pop Swamp pop is a music genre indigenous to the Acadiana region of south Louisiana and an adjoining section of southeast Texas. Created in the 1950s by young Cajuns and Creoles, it combines New Orleans–style rhythm and blues, country and western ...
legend DM Bob have recorded and performed together since 2005, releasing their album ''Bum Steer'' in August of that year and co-producing the debut album by the experimental pop band Marseille Figs. He has written articles on copyright and the
Creative Commons License A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...
. In July 2005, Finer won the PRS Foundation New Music Award on the basis of his proposal to build a device that will automatically "compose" a song of indeterminate length by harnessing the creative force of the weather. His proposal read: :The countryside is shot through with holes in the ground; wells, mine shafts, fissures, bunkers, ventilation holes. In this piece of music the venue is a deep shaft in which there will be placed, at different heights, bowls of different sizes and tunings pivoted about their center of gravity, the instruments. The players, the drips of water, will strike the bowls, ringing them like bells. As they fill with water their timbres will change, and the delicate equilibrium of their pivots will cause them to sway slightly, modulating the tones. Overflowing, a bowl will drip into ones below it. :Amplification will be facilitated by a tube rising up from within the shaft, into a brass horn twenty feet above the surface. Akin to the bamboo tube in the Sui-kink Tsu, the horn not only amplifies the sounds but forms a sculptural object, a focus in the landscape. The work was constructed and installed in King's Wood near
Challock Challock is a mostly wooded, large village and civil parish in the Borough of Ashford, Kent, England. The village name derives from the old English 'Cealfloca' - calf enclosure. A clear nucleus of the village is centred south of the port of ...
, Kent over the summer of 2006. In March 2012, Mobile Sinfonia, a global composition for ringtones was launched, developed during a year spent as a non-resident artist at the
University of Bath (Virgil, Georgics II) , mottoeng = Learn the culture proper to each after its kind , established = 1886 (Merchant Venturers Technical College) 1960 (Bristol College of Science and Technology) 1966 (Bath University of Technology) 1971 (univ ...
. This piece concerns mutual invasion of soundscape via
ringtone A ringtone, ring tone or ring is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call. Originally referring to and made by the electromechanical striking of bells, the term now refers to any sound on any device alerting of a new incoming ...
s. He later received an honorary doctorate from Bath. He is working on a number of new projects continuing his interest in long-term sustainability and the reconfiguring of older technologies, including a series of hurdy-gurdy recordings, Spiegelei, a spherical camera obscura featuring Finer's innovative 360-degree projection system and Supercomputer, a 5 bit mechanical sculpture which computes minimal musical scores.


References


External links


Artangel:Longplayer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Finer, Jem 1955 births Living people Alumni of Keele University English banjoists People from Stoke-on-Trent Musicians from Staffordshire The Pogues members People associated with the University of Oxford English contemporary artists