Pet Shop Boys Turn Alan Turing’s Story Into “A Man From The Future”.
By Marvin Valdez
Pet Shop Boys release A Man from the Future, a concept album about gay mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing, on 9 October 2026 through Parlophone Records. Eight tracks trace Turing from schoolboy to war hero to convicted criminal. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe call it a “musical memorial”.
Eight Chapters, One Extraordinary Life
The record was built with Andrew Hodges, whose biography Alan Turing: The Enigma shaped how the world understands the man. Hodges’ text runs through the album as narration, read by actress Juliet Stevenson. Sven Helbig wrote the string arrangements for the Manchester Camerata Octet, and boys from the Manchester Grammar School choir sing on four tracks.
It unfolds chronologically. School days and a first understanding of his own desire. Cambridge. Bletchley Park and the German Enigma machine. The birth of the digital computer, and Turing’s hunch that machines would one day think. Then the trial.
Sound like heavy going for a pop record? Not for the duo who took It’s A Sin to number one.
The Part Britain Would Rather Forget
Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952, the same charge that destroyed Oscar Wilde. He took hormone injections rather than prison. He died two years later, aged 41, and the inquest recorded suicide. A royal pardon came in 2013, and the Alan Turing law extended pardons to thousands of other convicted men in 2017. At DNA, we’d call that about six decades late.
“Our motive in creating this work was to make a musical memorial to Alan Turing who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted for his sexuality,” Tennant and Lowe told NME. “He also looked forward to a time when being gay would be accepted as normal. In both his professional and private lives, he was ahead of his time.”
Tennant knows about arriving late to your own story. He came out in Attitude in 1994, eight years after West End Girls went to number one.
Where To Hear It First
The BBC premieres the album on Radio 6 Music and Radio 3 on 4 October, with the recording then available on BBC Sounds. Tennant, Lowe and Hodges host a full playback and conversation at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester on 8 October.
