Pet Shop Boys talk the legacy of Alan Turing, AI and the "expression of fascism" in Dover and Portsmouth protests

“The reason it’s called A Man from the Future is twofold,” Neil Tennant told me in 2014, when we met to discuss, for RT, Pet Shop Boys’ new “orchestral pop” piece ahead of its premiere at that year’s BBC Proms. “Alan Turing invented what we now call the computer. And in terms of his sexuality, he realised [at school] that he was homosexual.

“Later, during the war, at Bletchley Park, he told people quite openly that he was homosexual,” the musician chuckled, incredulous at the frankness of the maths genius who, at the top-secret wartime code-breaking HQ in Buckinghamshire, helped crack Germany’s encryption machine, Enigma. “This, of course, generally speaking, shocked people – it was illegal, disgusting and immoral and all the rest of it.”

Turing was indeed eventually prosecuted and endured state-mandated chemical castration. In 1954, aged 41, he took his own life by eating a cyanide-laced apple. He was, then, an early martyr in the fight for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people.

But as Tennant pointed out, “Alan was a very logical person and didn’t see anything wrong with [expressing his sexuality]. With that attitude, he’s a man from the future. So,” he concluded, alongside Turing’s invention of future-changing technology, “those two things are intertwined.”

Now, in 2026, A Man from the Future is a work from the past reinvented for the present. With the original one-off live performance and broadcast at the Royal Albert Hall being, as Tennant puts it now, “essentially a demo with an orchestra”, he and musical partner Chris Lowe have refreshed and recorded the eight tracks in a Berlin studio and are releasing it as an album.

“The Proms was a bit rushed,” reflects Lowe. “It was an exciting and nerve-racking evening because it was going out live on the radio,” adds Tennant. “And as it was a world premiere, you never know what’s going to go wrong. But luckily, it went well. Judging it afterwards, though, we thought it had got too big, and we always meant to come back to it.”

They duly asked original scorer Sven Helbig to scale down the large 2014 orchestration, and the German composer settled on an octet, now played by Manchester Camerata. They also wanted to make it “more electric”, and commissioned input from “brilliant” Dutch electronic music programmer Maarten Vos. “He’s got loads of great analogue synths,” says Lowe, “so it gives more warmth and depth from the digital sounds that we were using. It’s a better realisation of our intent.”

As Tennant puts it, “the Proms piece was a grand statement and quite powerful. But this more electronic nature is true to the Alan Turing story. We’re talking about the man who invented the computer. Also, the more intimate string arrangement makes you concentrate, makes you feel a personal sense of Alan much more.”

That, ultimately, was Tennant’s original goal: “Tell Alan’s story and this incredible combination of code-breaking, inventing the computer and being openly gay – and then him paying the price for being open. It’s a remarkable, poignant and tragic story because he ends up killing himself. And by making it smaller musically, you’re more aware of the personality of Alan.”

In the new version of A Man from the Future – which is again benefiting from a bespoke broadcast, on Radio 3 and 6 Music – the duo have been aided in their aim to recentre Turing by a timely modernising of the text narrated by Juliet Stevenson. It’s written by Andrew Hodges and adapted from his definitive biography, Alan Turing: the Enigma.

“I’ve updated the [final, title track] with questions about artificial intelligence, which was absolutely Alan’s thing,” the author and mathematician says. Some eight decades before the current debate over the prize and peril of AI, “it was him who started off questions about what on earth artificial intelligence was going to mean.”

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Why do we need another reminder of Alan Turing? After all, a few months after the original broadcast of the Prom came the biopic The Imitation Game, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role. “It was a good film,” says Tennant mildly. “I don’t know how accurate it is to the story because it’s a Hollywood film. I remember it said on the poster, ‘a superb thriller’. I think Alan Turing would be surprised that the film about his life was called a thriller,” he remarks to a burst of laughter from Lowe. “Also, they sort of glossed over the gay thing.”

Still, Hodges understands the question. “That’s a good point. ‘We’ve heard enough about Alan Turing now, give it a rest...’ Probably some people will think that. But the piece links some central things together. The dominant technology to come out of the 20th century has been computer science. That came out of the Second World War, and Turing was at the very centre of the intelligence operation.

“The other big change, essentially, was the question of individuality, and sexuality in particular. Of rights, in the relationship between the individual and society, law and government. Those things have changed. And Alan was at the centre of that, too.”

I wonder, also, if Tennant and Lowe agree with Russell T Davies – whose acclaimed 2021 series It’s a Sin was titled after Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 number one single – who posited in his scorching recent Channel 4 series Tip Toe that hard-won LGBTQ+ rights are newly under attack.

“Well, no rights that have been won can ever be complacently assumed,” says Tennant. “Because they are always won against opposition, and that opposition can always regroup. That’s true of all sorts of rights. I mean, we are living in an era that I find incredibly bizarre, where we are seeing a genuine resurgence in fascism. The pictures from Dover and Portsmouth, these guys in balaclavas,” he says of the recent anti-migrant protests. “That’s literally an expression of fascism.”

Equally, he adds, there are forces in the world intent on turning back the clock. “Trump’s thing is ‘Make America Great Again’. Why not just make America great? ‘Again’ implies there was a mythical period in the past where it was all right, and then it all went wrong. And when did it all go wrong? When we gave civil rights to African-Americans, when the gays got rights, when men started marrying men, and women started marrying women.”

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Ultimately, while Tennant doesn’t feel “paranoid” about these developments, “they’ve got to be watched”. Consequently, reminding modern audiences of the triumph and tragedy of Turing is indeed vital.

“Yes,” he says. “This music represents the emotion and striving behind the science and the private life. Even if you saw the film, it didn’t really tell you the incredible story of his life. And this piece does in a concise and, I hope, moving way. We hope people learn the lesson that someone like Alan Turing can come along and be totally true to himself and a genius in terms of computer science and mathematics – that those things can work together.”

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A Man from the Future is released on CD and vinyl and via download from Friday 9 October.

Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing, is available via iPlayer.

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