Pet Shop Boys Give Alan Turing a Long-Overdue Apology with New Album

The album's final track isn't a song at all — it's a 2009 political speech. In the recording, then-UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologizes for the government's prosecution of Alan Turing on charges of homosexuality decades earlier. By closing the record with this audio, Pet Shop Boys effectively put an audible full stop on a case that had lingered for more than sixty years.

The album, titled *A Man From The Future*, will be released October 9 via Parlophone Records, created by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe in collaboration with Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, drawing on Hodges' book *Alan Turing: the Enigma*. The record unfolds across eight chapters in chronological order — from Turing's early fascination with mathematics and science, his time at Cambridge, his pivotal role cracking the German Enigma code and pioneering early digital computing during WWII, through to his predictions about artificial intelligence, and finally his trial and conviction for homosexuality and his death by suicide in 1954. The eight chapters are titled "Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know," "He Dreamed Of Machines," "The Enigma," "Other Ranks," "The Memory And The Control," "The Trial," "Only In His Death," and the title track "A Man From The Future."

The music, helmed by Pet Shop Boys themselves, blends electronic production with orchestral arrangements — the string arrangements were handled by Sven Helbig and performed by the Manchester Camerata Octet, with the Manchester Grammar School boys' choir featured on four tracks. Narration throughout is read by actress Juliet Stevenson, drawing directly from Hodges' original text. In a statement, Tennant and Lowe said: "Our motivation for creating this piece was to build a musical monument to Alan Turing — a man who gave so much to his country and the world, and was repaid by being prosecuted for his sexuality." They added: "He made a huge contribution to defeating Germany in World War II, and was a pioneer of computing who imagined a world of intelligent computers. At the same time, he looked forward to a day when homosexuality would be seen as normal. In both his professional and private life, he was ahead of his time."

Eleven Years From the Proms Stage to the Studio

This isn't actually a brand-new work. Pet Shop Boys and Andrew Hodges first developed an early version of the piece back in 2012, performing it with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Proms in 2014. Revisiting it now, the duo have added more electronic elements, rewritten the orchestral parts, and updated portions of the spoken text — essentially formalizing a concert performance into a proper studio release.

A string of broadcasts and events surround the release: BBC Radio 6 Music will air the album in full on Sunday, October 4, along with an interview with Pet Shop Boys about the reworking process; BBC Radio 3 will broadcast it again that same evening. On Thursday, October 8, Pet Shop Boys and Andrew Hodges will appear at a listening event at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, where the album will be played in full followed by a conversation between the two. Tickets went on sale Monday, September 7 at 10am UK time.

This album announcement comes right on the heels of Pet Shop Boys' "Obscure" residency earlier this year — a five-night run in London dedicated entirely to deep cuts and rarities, featuring the live debuts of songs like "Jack The Lad" (1986), "Hit And Miss" (1996), and "Always" (2002), with Johnny Marr even appearing as a surprise guest. The duo's last studio album, *Nonetheless*, was released in April 2024 as their fifteenth studio record; in a later interview with NME, they described it as their "queer album." Its companion remix collection, *Disco 5*, featured contributions from Noel Gallagher, Sleaford Mods, Paul Weller, and Primal Scream.