He dreamed of machines

Oh. Deep. Joy.

Last night, I was treated (by our good friend Paul, for my forthcoming birthday) to a most incredible evening - not just "a Prom" (in the glittering Royal Albert Hall), but THE Pet Shop Boys' Prom!

Opening with a heavily melodramatic orchestration of several PSB chart hits - Overture to Performance, masterminded by arranger Richard Niles - we knew we were in for a real treat. And when none other than the legendary Chrissie Hynde took to the stage to perform the next piece (“Four songs in A minor”), we were thrilled. As described admirably by Adam Sweeting in The Telegraph:

Chrissie Hynde teetered to the microphone in white blouse and tails, skinny jeans and high heels, like some sort of Nashville gunslinger.

She added the right amount of frayed world-weariness to Badalementi’s mooching, indigo-tinted arrangements. Love Is a Catastrophe felt like the aural equivalent of a bourbon hangover, while her duet with Tennant on Rent was piercingly bittersweet.

Pet Shop Boys and Chrissie Hynde - Rent (Proms 2014)

I couldn't help but think, however, that when it comes to the clipped, lyrical songs of Messrs Tennant and Lowe, a legendary diva with somewhat clearer diction might have worked a bit better.

It was a remarkable experience, nonetheless - but nothing compared to what was to follow!

For this was the world première of the Boys' classical meisterwerk - a tribute to the pioneering computer genius Alan Turing - A Man From the Future. Part Chris-Lowe-synthesiser-odyssey, part orchestral symphony, with narration by Oscar-winner Juliet Stephenson, the piece told the tragic story of the gay outsider genius from boyhood love and loss, through his amazing contribution to wartime code-breaking, to his persecution, death and eventual belated pardon by the establishment.

Mr Tennant stood in the sidelines as a part of the chorus, while the BBC Concert Orchestra (conducted by Dominic Wheeler) and Miss Stephenson took centre stage (the latter, bizarrely suspended in a commentary box in the proscenium). As the story unfolded, so the music mirrored the emotions - and throughout, He Dreamed of Machines...

Pet Shop Boys - He Dreamed of Machines

The whole eight-part composition was an utterly beautiful feast for the senses (and, given its subject matter, an emotional journey through a life ruined by bigotry).

I feel privileged to have experienced it.

A Man From the Future on the Pet Shop Boys website.

Cleaning my soul

From the BBC:

Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing has been given a posthumous royal pardon.

It overturns his 1952 conviction for homosexuality for which he was punished by being chemically castrated.

The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that proved vital to the Allies in World War II.

The pardon was granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a request by Justice Minister Chris Grayling.

I feel so delighted, I am going to play a rare beast - a tasteful Xmas-time song - it's The Power of Love by Frankie Goes To Hollywood (from twenty-nine years ago this week!):

Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power of Love

I'll protect you from the Hooded Claw
Keep the vampires from your door

Feels like fire
I'm so in love with you
Dreams are like angels
They keep bad at bay - bad at bay
Love is the light
Scaring darkness away - yeah

I'm so in love with you
Purge the soul
Make love your goal

The power of love
A force from above
Cleaning my soul
Flame on burn desire
Love with tongues of fire
Purge the soul
Make love your goal

I'll protect you from the Hooded Claw
Keep the vampires from your door
When the chips are down I'll be around
With my undying, death-defying
Love for you

Envy will hurt itself
Let yourself be beautiful
Sparkling love, flowers
And pearls and pretty girls
Love is like an energy
Rushin' rushin' inside of me

The power of love
A force from above
Cleaning my soul
Flame on burn desire
Love with tongues of fire
Purge the soul
Make love your goal

This time we go sublime
Lovers entwine - divine divine
Love is danger, love is pleasure
Love is pure - the only treasure

I'm so in love with you
Purge the soul
Make love your goal

The power of love
A force from above
Cleaning my soul
The power of love
A force from above
A sky-scraping dove

Flame on burn desire
Love with tongues of fire
Purge the soul
Make love your goal

I'll protect you from the Hooded Claw
Keep the vampires from your door.

Good news or not, I still give my traditional greeting at this time of year - Bah Humbug...

Computer love

Continuing our countdown to Gay Pride on Saturday, we should not forget that yesterday was the 101st anniversary of the birth of that remarkable gay hero Alan Turing (read my blog on his centenary last year).

In honour of the greatest computer genius of the 20th century, I thought a bit of Kraftwerk might not go amiss...

Kraftwerk - Numbers/Computer World (Live at Tate Modern, Feb 2013)

Pride in London 2013

The cost of intolerance

About time, too!

From The Guardian:

The head of GCHQ has spoken with regret of the treatment of Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker and mathematical genius, who killed himself in 1954, two years after being convicted of homosexuality, which was then a criminal offence.

In a rare speech to mark the centenary of Turing's birth, Iain Lobban said the unique people the country needed were often mavericks, and it was his job to set them to work in the world of secret intelligence, "not to tell them how to live their lives".

Lobban told an audience in Leeds that Turing was a national asset whose death robbed the country of "one of our greatest minds". He said more people like Turing were needed if Britain was to stay ahead of the challenges and dangers posed from cyberspace.

"We can't rewrite the past," he said. "We can't wish mid-20th century Britain into a different society with different attitudes. We can be glad that we live in a more tolerant age. And we should remember that the cost of intolerance towards Alan Turing was his loss to the nation."

Lobban, who has been head of the government's electronic intelligence-gathering centre for four years, described Turing as "a founder of the information age... One of the people whose concepts are at the heart of a technological revolution which is as far-reaching as the industrial revolution."

He added: "And of course there are many Turing stories: burying his silver bullion and then forgetting where he had buried it; chaining his mug to his radiator; cycling in his gas mask to ward off hay fever.

"But Turing was not an eccentric, unless you believe that there is only one way of being normal and to be otherwise is to be peculiar. Turing wasn't eccentric. He was unique."

Better late than never, I suppose - an apology from the establishment that failed to defend its own employee Alan Turing's reputation, three years on from then Prime Minister Gordon Brown's expression of regret on behalf of the British Government.

Read my blog about Alan Turing's centenary.

The exhibition Codebreaker - Alan Turing's life and legacy is on at the Science Museum until 31st July 2013.

We can only see a short distance ahead

"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."

Today marks the centenary of one of the most fascinating of gay men, the mathematical genius Alan Turing - famed as the breaker of the Nazis' Enigma Code, and father of the modern computer and of the scientific theory of "artificial intelligence".

His story is well known - a genius with possible signs of Asperger's Syndrome, a typical "boffin", all crumpled suits and illegible handwriting, and a gay man hounded to death by the very authorities in peacetime that his war effort had fought to save. Much is being made in the press of his personal contribution to current science, and many are the efforts to get his reputation officially recognised and his abysmal criminal treatment as a gay man pardoned. And well they should!

However, Alan Turing's complex personal life is a subject of many theories and speculations. His place as a gay icon is assured - this year's Manchester Pride (25th August 2012) theme is Queer'd Science, in honour of the "father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker and victim of prejudice."

His homosexuality does indeed appear pivotal to his subsequent emergence as a brilliant scientist. The death of his schoolmate and first love Christopher Morcom ("He made everyone else seem so ordinary") appears to have been a central factor in Alan’s subsequent development. Shaken by the unexpected loss, he rejected the religion of his parents and his school, and thus began a lifelong dedication to atheism and logical scientific analysis.


Drawing of Alan Turing ("Hockey. Or Watching the daisies grow") by his mother at his preparatory school, Hazelhurst, Sussex. Annotated by Mrs Turing "sent to Miss Dunwall, matron at Hazelhurst. Date Spring term 1923."

Although often depicted as the "passive victim", Mr Turing's surprising defiance in the face of persecution is excellently analysed by the author of Alan Turing: the enigma Andrew Hodges:

[His]... self-effacement, mixed with a dark hint that he had actually contributed something better than "donkey work" to the [development of the] computer, typified the cryptic way he spoke of himself.

In this era, most people who heard on the grapevine of [his] story probably assumed that his death typified the suicide culturally expected of ashamed and exposed homosexuals.

In fact, his death came more than two years after the arrest. And he had shown defiance rather than shame.

He told the police that he thought there was "a Royal Commission sitting to legalise it".

In 1952 and again in 1953 he insisted on holidays abroad, in Norway and Greece, explicitly for freedom from British law, and very likely influenced by hearing of the early Scandinavian gay movement. His ears pricked up at a hint of modernity.

But as a gay man, Turing was particularly unlucky. The point in about 1948 when he decided to have a more positive gay life was just the point when there was a change from silence to active persecution...

...Turing's cryptology work at Bletchley Park helped counter the threat posed by Germany's U-boats These changes, taken together, have made Turing much more accessible than he could ever have been in his lifetime. He has become, posthumously, a modern icon.

Alan Turing drank the cyanide but left an apple by his bed.

It was a grim joke against his reputation for impracticality, kindly allowing those who wanted to believe it that he had ingested the poison by mistake.

Turing himself knew the apple as an icon of death in the Snow White story, and perhaps his theatrical prop was also alluding to the great decision he made in 1938 to abandon the Eden of pure mathematics for the deadly business of duelling with Nazi Germany.

His story is tragic, but this last twist to his story is part of the comedy of life which, despite everything, he did his best to enjoy.

Amen to that.

Let's leave the last word to Dr James Grime, Enigma Project Officer at Cambridge University, who provides (for me at least) possibly the clearest explanation of exactly what contribution Alan Turing's work made to the world of mathematics and computer science. A fitting tribute to the life of a genius:

Alan Turing: celebrating the life of a genius

Alan Turing website

More Alan Turing on the BBC

Turing apology

Thanks to everyone who responded to the petition asking the British government make an unreserved apology for the inhumane treatment of one of the UK's unsung heroes Alan Turing, the mastermind of code-breaking during WW2, developer of the first true computer, and ultimately hounded to death by the establishment for being gay. [Read more in The Independent]

Here is Gordon Brown's response in full:

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last twelve years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

If you would like to help preserve Alan Turing's memory for future generations, please donate to Bletchley Park.