Pet Shop Boys - A man from the future

Alan Turing's extraordinary life becomes a Pet Shop Boys song cycle on A man from the future, an eight-track album rooted in the duo's theatrical side.

The piece began in 2014 as a BBC Proms commission, premiered at the Royal Albert Hall with text drawn from Andrew Hodges' biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have since reworked it with Hodges, tilting the balance towards electronics and adding intimate string arrangements by Sven Helbig, played by the Manchester Camerata Octet, with boys from the Manchester Grammar School choir adding voices along the way.

Juliet Stevenson narrates the story, moving from the childhood curiosity of Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know, named after a book that fired the young Turing's imagination, to the codebreaking of The Enigma and the cruelty of The Trial. He Dreamed of Machines captures his leap into computing, and the title track closes the record with archival words from Gordon Brown.

It sits comfortably beside their Battleship Potemkin score and The Most Incredible Thing ballet, a reminder that pop craft and serious storytelling have always shared a stage in this partnership. Tender and quietly angry, it is a fitting tribute to a man whose ideas shaped the modern world and whose treatment still shocks.