As part of the 2026 Durham Book Festival last week Fiona Hill, Chancellor of Durham University and past US political advisor from Bishop Auckland, interviewed Neil Tennant, Newcastle native and member of the famous pop group Pet Shop Boys.
This year the central premise of the festival was to celebrate 2026 as the National Year of Reading and what Neil Tennant’s musical career offers is (perhaps surprisingly) a profound celebration of it.
Stepping out to a packed and eager audience, Hill and Tennant opened the event giving the crowd exactly what they wanted – a discussion of the Pet Shop Boys’s new album Man From the Future – which in a ‘wonderful coincidence’ (as Hill called it) was released only a day prior to the event.
This topic elicited enthusiastic cheers and applause from attending fans already familiar with the album, but Tennant and Lowe’s work is not solely a pop triumph, but also a triumph of collaboration.
Based on the life and tragedy of codebreaker Alan Turing, Man From the Future is inherently historical and literary as Hill immediately pointed out. It takes consistent inspiration from Andrew Hodges 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma and the title track ‘Man From the Future’ includes a narration of Turing’s life by the actress Juliet Stevenson.
This intersection between music, literature, history and politics has long been a focus of the Pet Shop Boys.
T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland influenced ‘West End Girls’, Sarah Wise’s book The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London influenced ‘The Resurrectionist’ and a number of their records including ‘Living in the Past’, ‘Hymn (In memoriam Alexei Navalny)’ and ‘A Top Secret Washing Machine’ all concern Putin’s Russia and Tennant’s longstanding fascination with ‘Russian culture and the fatalism of Russia’.
Although Tennant when asked whether bringing people into reading is an aim when he creates music, admitted with a laugh that it is not, it has had precisely this effect. At the end of the event one audience member told the theatre that the 2014 BBC Proms performance of ‘Man From the Future’ inspired her to read Hodges’s biography, and in Italian no less!
Whether intentional or not therefore, Tennant has become a champion for reading and education, and is one equally hopeful for its future, offering audiences perhaps my favourite musing of the whole weekend – ‘Look at what a piece of technology a book is. You haven’t even got to plug it in!’
Seeing Man From the Future as ‘a bit weird’, ‘definitely unusual’ but ‘quite original’, Tennant stated that he likes the fact that his listeners have their ‘horizons expanded’ when they encounter his work – ‘if we’ve contributed to that I’ll be very pleased’.
Growing up in North Gosforth in Newcastle, Tennant revealed that two main places had a profound impact on him – Gosforth Public Library and Newcastle Theatre Royal.
At the age of nine, Tennant’s mother took him to see the Royal Ballet at Newcastle Theatre Royal and from that moment he was hooked, attending shows alone on Saturday afternoons, joining the Young People’s Theatre and even writing a play performed at Newcastle University Theatre with the group.
Although he went on to work as an editor at MacDonald Educational Publishing, ITV Books and Smash Hits after graduating university, Tennant was eager to make it clear to audiences that it was the People’s Theatre which had more of an impact on him and his approach to music. ‘Publishing made me an editor’, but theatre gave him his passion.
Tennant was also in awe of his local public library, joking on stage that he ‘couldn’t believe you could take books home with you’. He recalled specifically his love for The Lives of The Great Composers, a book by Harold C Schonberg, whose back pages were filled with sheet music.
Suddenly his love for collaborating with orchestras makes a lot of sense!
Tennant’s interest in Russia, and history more generally, can also be traced back to the north, he told the audience. For, at a local garden fete during his youth, he came across a copy of Alan Moorehead’s The Russian Revolution and became enthralled. Tennant went on to study History at North London Polytechnic and mused that history is ‘the sort of continuum of my life…I’m always reading history books’.
Perhaps the garden fete really did spark it all…
If there was one aspect of Fiona Hill’s Durham Book Festival interview that struck me most, beyond the sold out theatre and enthusiastic applause bookending the event, it was precisely who was on stage.
In front of me sat a woman from Bishop Auckland who had travelled across the globe to America to become a leading political advisor and a man from Newcastle-upon-Tyne who traded the northern city for the southern capital and became an international popstar.
Yet both found their way back.
In front of me sat not only Fiona Hill and Neil Tennant but the Chancellor of Durham University and a Durham University Doctor of Letters.
Although Hill’s father may once have told her, ‘there is nothing for you here, pet’, advice that led her first to the University of St Andrews and then to Harvard University, and Tennant may once have believed Newcastle had a ‘feeling of limited possibility’, their return indicates change.
During the interview, Tennant remarked that becoming an honorary Doctor of Letters at Durham as a local ‘felt like a moment’ and if their return signals anything, is it not that the North’s ‘moment’ is here too?
Pet Shop Boys; A Man From The Future
