He dreamed of machines. Pet Shop Boys revisit one of their most ambitious works.

Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist before computer science was even a thing.

Born in 1912, he joined Bletchley Park during the Second World War and became one of the driving forces behind the breaking of Germany’s Enigma codes. His work helped turn the tide of the conflict and undoubtedly saved countless lives.

After the war, he continued developing the ideas that would lay the foundations for modern computing. He envisaged a universal machine capable of performing the functions of any other machine. The theoretical basis of the computer age.

In 1952, Turing was arrested and prosecuted for gross indecency.

His crime was having a sexual relationship with another man.

He was subjected to chemical castration.

Two years later, Alan Turing died by suicide, aged just 41.

The country he had helped defend had repaid him with persecution and disgrace.

It is a remarkable, deeply troubling story. And, on the face of it, a rather unexpected subject for a Pet Shop Boys album.

Not because it lacks drama. The tragedy is almost unbearable. But because so much of Turing’s extraordinary life unfolded through mathematics, theories and ideas. The great intellectual breakthroughs that changed the world were, to Turing, simply the logical consequences of asking the right questions.

How do you turn that into music?

Indeed, it’s not entirely clear what A Man from the Future actually is.

It’s not a conventional concept album. It’s not a musical. Nor is it the soundtrack to a film or stage production.

Perhaps an orchestral biography is the closest description.

And this is certainly no pop album.

The music moves between the dreamlike and the overtly mechanical, providing a shifting electronic and orchestral landscape beneath the unfolding story of Turing’s life, told across eight distinct movements.

Juliet Stevenson narrates with a measured, almost documentary restraint. Beneath her voice, the Pet Shop Boys’ synthesisers pulse, swirl and quietly repeat. Strings swell. Choirs emerge from the background, bringing moments of unexpected tenderness and pathos.

Occasionally Neil Tennant’s unmistakable voice appears, haunting and plaintive, adding another human presence to the unfolding narrative.

The musical language is carefully constructed. Repetition suggests machinery. Rhythms establish patterns. Melodies develop and return, sometimes subtly altered, as though a sequence of instructions is being processed and reconsidered.

There is something particularly affecting about hearing electronic music used to tell the story of the man whose ideas helped make it possible.

The machines are telling the story of their creator.

But the most powerful moments arrive when the precision gives way to emotion. When the ordered structures of the music begin to fracture beneath the weight of the human story.

Because however logical the mathematics, there was nothing logical about the cruelty inflicted upon Turing.

Pet Shop Boys are elder statesmen of British pop these days. Forty years of hits and counting, with a catalogue that has long since established their place in popular music.

But Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have never been entirely content to remain within its boundaries.

Alongside the immaculate electronic pop songs sit theatrical productions, ballet scores and orchestral experiments. Projects that have sometimes existed at the margins of their recorded output, waiting patiently to be rediscovered.

A Man from the Future was originally performed at the BBC Proms in 2014, before largely disappearing from public view.

An intriguing appendix to their catalogue.

And perhaps understandably so.

There are no obvious hit singles here. No great dancefloor anthems. No choruses designed to send an arena audience into collective rapture.

Just music, memory and the story of an extraordinary man.

Not exactly commercial territory.

Now, following the renewed attention recently given to their Battleship Potemkin soundtrack, A Man from the Future has been revisited, revised and recorded afresh for release across a selection of physical formats.

The new recording features the Manchester Camerata Octet, the Manchester Grammar School Choir and string arrangements by Sven Helbig, with Stevenson returning to narrate.

Alongside Battleship Potemkin and their ballet score The Most Incredible Thing, it forms something of an unofficial trilogy of Pet Shop Boys works that owe more to orchestral composition and cinematic soundscapes than to West End Girls or Go West.

The pick of the new editions is the double-disc coloured vinyl release, which includes instrumental versions of the eight movements.

And it is here that the music reveals another dimension.

Freed from the responsibility of carrying the narrative, the compositions become something more abstract. The music escapes the boundaries of its original purpose and becomes the dreamscape it always promised.

Mechanical rhythms pulse with the monotonous certainty of automation. Strings and synthesisers trace delicate patterns around one another. Melodies appear, dissolve and return in subtly altered forms.

There is beauty in the repetition.

And sadness in the spaces between.

Without the spoken words, the listener is free to find their own emotional connections. The music no longer describes Turing’s life so much as evokes its contradictions: extraordinary intellectual freedom alongside profound personal constraint.

The memory and the control.

It is an unusual achievement for a group so closely associated with the precision of the three-minute pop song.

But perhaps not an entirely surprising one.

After all, Pet Shop Boys have spent much of their career finding melancholy beneath the surface of electronic music. The loneliness within the dancefloor anthem. The vulnerability beneath the immaculate production. The human emotion concealed inside the machine.

Here, those instincts are given an altogether more serious purpose.

A Man from the Future is unlikely to become anybody’s favourite Pet Shop Boys album in the conventional sense.

It doesn’t really ask to be.

Perhaps it is a work for the devoted. For those prepared to follow Tennant and Lowe beyond the familiar landmarks of their catalogue.

Or perhaps it is for anybody willing to spend an hour considering the life of a man whose ideas transformed the modern world, and whose own world could not find the humanity to accept him.

Approach it with an open mind and it becomes an absorbing, occasionally unsettling and ultimately moving experience.

A work about machines that never forgets the man.

And a reminder that progress in technology is not necessarily progress in humanity.

Pet Shop Boys continue their musical output into their fifth decade. A Man From The Future is available now on streaming but also on vinyl, CD and Blu-Ray.