A Man from the Future review: What took Pet Shop Boys so long to release this wonderful album?
The most pressing question raised by this wonderful new Pet Shop Boys album is not why Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have chosen to release a synth-pop rock opera about the gay computer pioneer Alan Turing but why they didn’t get around to it sooner. Turing was one of the fathers of modern computing – a title he of course must share with the 19th-century University College Cork mathematics professor George Boole – but his career was severely damaged when he was prosecuted for gross indecency in 1952. That tragic story carries obvious resonances for Pet Shop Boys, who were still very much in the closet in the 1980s, when gay celebrities lived in mortal terror of being outed by the tabloids. There are other, more modern resonances to the story of Turing’s ground-breaking work in computer science and his subsequent downfall. We live in the age of the thinking algorithm, with AI promising, or perhaps threatening, to remake our lives in radical and not necessarily pleasant ways. Nobody can predict how this story ends, but we know that it begins with Turing, who devised the “Turing test”, a process to judge whether a machine can exhibit human-level intelligence. Left to his own devices, who knows what other contributions he could have made to AI or how he might have impacted on the future. He was instead arrested for gross indecency and subjected to chemical castration. Had any of this happened in Ireland it would still be rolled out as a signifier of how priest-ridden the country was in the mid-20th century. But because it was Britain, Turing has instead ascended to pop immortality as the subject of one of the better Pet Shop Boys albums of the past decade, a significant improvement on the undercooked Nonetheless, from 2024. That record was a halfhearted tilt at capturing the dance-floor glories of the mid-1980s, when Tennant and Lowe ruled the charts as a two-headed Noël Coward of disco hedonism. But there has always been another, more melancholic Pet Shop Boys, and that’s the register they adopt throughout A Man from the Future, which unfolds under a deep hum of sadness. The tone is set with an opening narration by the actor Juliet Stevenson , who imperiously frames Turing’s life as a tug of war between the flesh and the intellect. Tennant takes up that message on He Dreamed of Machines, a synth odyssey where his vocals tremble and Lowe’s synths stab with woozy majesty. It’s like encountering Wagner in a funeral home. The ache is even more pronounced on The Enigma, a quietly pounding floor-filler, and on the ballad Other Ranks, which lurches into a sinister jazz refrain. Here Turing is a man on the town, enjoying whatever the night has in store, not yet understanding how his private pursuits will lead to his public undoing. The sense that something awful is hurtling down the electronic ley lines is intensified on The Memory and the Control, a stringed piece underpinned by a rising claustrophobia. Down and down we go into Turing’s personal hell on The Trial, where violins sigh and an electronic beat twitters as Tennant reads out the charges of “gross indecency” brought against him under British law. The album, which Pet Shop Boys recorded with Manchester Camerata Octet – the orchestrations are by Sven Helbig – finishes with the elegiac title track. “Can you feel what I feel?” Tennant sighs, capturing what it must have felt like to Turing as the country he had given so much to turned on him so viciously. A Man from the Future was originally performed at the Royal Albert Hall, in London, in 2014, as part of the BBC Proms, when critics were puzzled by its restraint. Fair enough: a lament for a tragically misunderstood postwar boffin is not everyone’s idea of a cracking night out. On record, however, that moderation proves highly effective, bringing Turing to life as a genius whose thoughts and emotions were too big for postwar Britain to comprehend. (The album is credited as a collaboration with Andrew Hodges, one of Turing’s biographers.) What Pet Shop Boys don’t do is wrestle at any great length with the darker aspects of Turing’s legacy, particularly his role as a founding figure in AI. That would be a very different album. Instead, A Man from the Future positions Turing as a visionary ripped apart by the British establishment. He had so much left to say – and, on this understated LP, he is allowed to roar.