Eight chapters of a life and a death: Pet Shop Boys are releasing an album about Alan Turing, and the last word in it isn’t theirs

Pet Shop Boys have announced a new album, A man from the future — an eight-part work about Alan Turing, the British mathematician and codebreaker who laid the foundations of modern computing. The record arrives on 9 October via Parlophone Records.

The news was announced by Pet Shop Boys themselves on their official website.

This is not a collection of songs about a historical figure but a single continuous eight-part work, written together with the man who knows more about Turing than anyone. The co-author is Professor Andrew Hodges, author of the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma — the very book that was turned into the film The Imitation Game.

Twelve years between the premiere and the release

The piece has a longer history than the announcement suggests. Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe and Hodges wrote it in 2012–2013, and it was heard for the first time in July 2014, at a late-night BBC Proms concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the BBC Concert Orchestra and the BBC Singers.

The duo have kept rewriting it ever since. There is noticeably more electronics in it now, and Sven Helbig has reduced the large orchestral forces to a chamber line-up of eight string players. Hodges, in parallel, updated the text that is read between the movements.

“We embarked on this piece to create a musical memorial to Alan Turing, a man who gave so much to his country and to the world and in return was persecuted for his sexuality. Alan made a huge contribution to the defeat of Germany in the Second World War and was a pioneer of computing: he imagined a world with intelligent computers. He also looked forward to a time when being gay would be regarded as normal. In both his professional and his private life he was ahead of his time,” said Pet Shop Boys.

The eight parts follow Turing’s life in order: his school years and early love of mathematics, the realisation of his own homosexuality, Cambridge, the breaking of the German Enigma cipher during the war, the development of modern computing, his prediction of artificial intelligence, the trial for homosexual acts — and his death in 1954.

In the finale, though, it is not the duo we hear. The closing track has a fragment of a Gordon Brown recording built into it: the statement the then British prime minister made in 2009, acknowledging Turing’s contribution to victory in the war and apologising for the way he had been treated after his conviction under homophobic laws. That is followed by a mention of the posthumous royal pardon granted to Turing by Elizabeth II in 2013.

Who plays and who reads

The string parts are performed by the Manchester Camerata Octet, and the text from Hodges’ book is read by the actress Juliet Stevenson — the same voice that read it at the 2014 premiere. On four of the eight tracks the boys’ choir of the Manchester Grammar School sings. The album was recorded over the past year in Britain and Germany and produced by Pet Shop Boys together with Helbig.

Sven Helbig is no accidental presence in this story: the German composer and co-founder of the Dresden Symphony Orchestra had already written orchestrations for the duo on Battleship Potemkin and The Most Incredible Thing.

The day before the release, on Thursday 8 October, the duo will host a playback of the album at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, with a conversation about the work featuring Pet Shop Boys themselves and Hodges.

Earlier we wrote about how Neil Tennant came back to his native Newcastle for a double film bill.