Pet Shop Boys released an album which is pretty much a biography of Alan Turing, the computing genius that helped develop the code and the machine BOMBE to crack Germany’s ENIGMA during World War II. The whole album is an autobiography first performed in 2014 but a new version has been recorded for release this year and for me sees Pet Shop Boys go old school to 1988by combining lush orchestration with spoken word – narrated by Juliet Stevenson, it also reminds me a little of the gravitas carried when Richard Burton narrated War Of The Worlds. It’s poetic and tells a sad story which ends in redemption.
Woven in this track is morse code in the beginning, it’s very sneakily hidden in there, and the builds to the first narration line makes it sounds like an audiobook not to mention a Netflix special – the PSB’s certainly know how to put together a score because that’s certainly what it sounds like.
This track explores Alan’s fascination with science specifically the natural order of things and how the body can be looked at as a machine. When you think about how his life was later that probably fed into his knowledge of coding and how the mind feeds into it and how his future relationships developed. All in all this is worth a listen even if it is to understand who he was.
