Nuevo álbum de los Pet Shop Boys dedicado a Alan Turning, "A MAN FROM THE FUTURE".
New album by the Pet Shop Boys devoted to Alan Turning, "A MAN FROM THE FUTURE".
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The British government took the man who broke Germany's wartime codes, convicted him of being gay, and offered him a choice between prison and hormone injections.
Pet Shop Boys have spent more than a decade turning that into an album.
A Man From The Future arrives on 9 October. Eight tracks, written by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe with Andrew Hodges, the biographer whose book is the reason most people know the story at all. Juliet Stevenson narrates. Sven Helbig wrote the orchestrations.
It follows Alan Turing from school through Cambridge, through the wartime codebreaking, through the machines he imagined that became the computer you are reading this on, and then to 1952, when he was charged with gross indecency.
The same charge they used on Oscar Wilde. He took the injections rather than prison. He was dead by 1954, at 41.
The final track on the album is the British government apologising. Gordon Brown's statement from 2009, then the royal pardon in 2013. Fifty five years too late to be of any use to him.
"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 said.
"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."
Created in collaboration with Alan Turning's biographer, Andrew Hodges, and performed by Pet Shop Boys and the Manchester Camerata Octet with narration by Juliet Stevenson and string arrangement by Sven Helbig, the work explores 8 significant chapters in the life and death of Alan Turning, the pioneering mathematician and cryptanalyst who laid the foundations of modern computing.
The work has been revised and updated since its first performance at the BBC Proms in 2014. This new version produced by the Pet Shop Boys and Sven Helbig is released today.
