Pet Shop Boys' New Album Is a Musical Memorial to Alan Turing

Pet Shop Boys have spent four decades turning big, unfashionable feelings into pop music — grief, ambition, shame, longing. Their new album asks something harder of the format: can pop music serve as an act of historical justice?

A Man from the Future, out 9 October on Parlophone Records, is an eight-track concept record built around the life of Alan Turing — the mathematician who broke the Enigma code and shortened the Second World War, and who was later prosecuted by his own government for being gay, chemically castrated, and died by suicide in 1954 at 41. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe wrote the music and lyrics; the album's spoken-word passages are drawn directly from Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges' definitive 1983 biography — the book that later became the basis for The Imitation Game — narrated by Juliet Stevenson. Sven Helbig composed the orchestrations, performed by the Manchester Camerata Octet.

"Our motive in creating this work was to make a musical memorial to Alan Turing," Pet Shop Boys said in announcing the album, "who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted for his sexuality."

That sentence carries the weight of the whole project. This isn't a duo dabbling in a historical curiosity for novelty's sake — it's a pop group with a long, specific relationship to queer history and its erasures, choosing to spend an album correcting one of Britain's most shameful debts. Turing's conviction under gross indecency laws in 1952, and the treatment that followed, wasn't officially apologised for until a royal pardon in 2013 — nearly sixty years after his death.

The shape of the record

The eight tracks trace Turing's life in something close to chronological order: from Natural wonders every child should know and He dreamed of machines through the wartime codebreaking of The Enigma, into Other ranks, The memory and the control, and The trial — the album's reckoning with his prosecution — before closing on Only in his death and the title track, A man from the future.

Working directly from Hodges' biography rather than a more general treatment of Turing's life is what separates this from a straightforward biopic-in-song. Hodges spent years with primary sources most popular accounts never touch, and his book is generally regarded as the most rigorous account of Turing's life and work — his involvement here isn't a credibility flourish, it's the album's actual research spine.

Where to hear it

BBC Radio 6 Music will premiere the album on 4 October, five days ahead of release. A listening event follows on 8 October at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester — a venue with its own direct line to the material, given the museum's own Turing and Bletchley Park holdings. The album is available to pre-order now.

Pet Shop Boys have never been a duo interested in comfortable nostalgia. A Man from the Future is a strange, serious, and clearly heartfelt way to spend a tenth decade of pop stardom — turning a national wrong into eight tracks of memorial.