In a short amount of time, Andy Tillison is going to release a project called Allium (which I now understand is being rebranded to Tillison Reingold Tiranti), based on an album he heard in his teenage years. His marketing for the album includes the story of how he came to hear the album in the first place. I didn’t want the story for this release of Allium to be told without the lying and complete betrayal of trust that Andy committed against me. His fans often admire Andy as a hero of the prog scene, and I can safely say that he is no hero.

I became friends with Andy eight years ago when I reviewed his album ‘Le Sacre du Travail’. It was the most unlikely of circumstances as my review was scathing, but written in the form of a ‘concept review’ to mirror his concept album. Andy seemed very impressed by the style of my writing and agreed with some of my opinions. We became friends afterward, met up a couple of times in person and spoke often about progressive rock and other things.

On Feb 6th this year, Andy mentioned an album he was trying to look for. A band called Alium (at that time he was spelling it with one ‘L’) who he had seen as a teenager in Italy in 1975. He had at one point owned a physical LP, but had given it away over 40 years ago. He seemed very fond of this music so I wanted to help him find it. Andy sent me the one picture he had of the album cover, which only took up a tiny area on the image as it was across the room from the camera, and the picture had been taken of the whole room. This made it difficult to make out distinct details, but it looked like a plain yellow cover with the outline of an allium flower, the band’s name in red and an indecipherable title in black underneath.

I decided to make a few posts on Reddit to see if anyone could help me find any information. Twelve days later, a user named Premiata1 commented on one of the posts and said that he had seen Allium live and that his sister owned the record we were looking for. Naturally I was overjoyed and mentioned this to Andy. Premiata1 was in his 60s and living in Italy, and was not familiar with Reddit so it took a while to get any photos or music files from him.

In the meantime, Andy was also making progress by enquiring with his friend who edited the Italian version of Prog Magazine, Antonio de Sarno. Antonio had reached out on an Italian prog forum and had been put in touch with Roberto de Sarno, Allium’s lead singer and the head of the band. Roberto revealed the story of Allium and told us that he had held onto the master tapes from the 1970s. At this point, I realised we could potentially turn this album into a reissue and was excited to bring this music to the public.

 As Roberto revealed the names of his former Albanian bandmates who he said he hadn’t spoken to since the 1970s (they had been deported), I decided to reach out to several people whose names and ages seemed to match on Facebook. Andy spent money sending the tapes to Jonas so that Jonas could digitise and remix the album. Andy sent me short clips from the master tapes which sounded amazing and I knew we could have a hit product, and it made me proud to be working on a long lost masterpiece.

This is when Premiata1 finally sent through pictures of the album cover and a vinyl rip of the music (which did sound like it came from a vinyl). It was astonishing to hear the thing in full and I couldn’t wait until Jonas was able to remix the album from the master tapes to have a clearer sounding version. Andy told me that Premiata1’s vinyl rip would help immensely in assisting Jonas put together the various different parts of the album to sound like the original so I felt like I had made a firm positive impression on how this final product would sound.

The pictures were more suspect. Firstly, the album title (that was in black on the initial picture I saw) was missing on this version. Secondly, the song lyrics printed in the gatefold did not look like they had been printed in the 70s, but added by a computer. And thirdly, there was a suspicious banana logo that appeared at much higher resolution than the image quality. I came up with the theory that when Premiata1’s nephew had scanned the LP, he had used optical character recognition to make the lyrics more legible. Andy agreed with this and it was soon confirmed by Premiata1.

I was ready to work with Andy to see the album become a success and had told my family and close friends about the project I was so proud to be working on. On 29 April, I noticed Andy had put up a teaser poster for Allium on the Tangent webpage. I began letting my colleagues at The Progressive Aspect know that something exciting was coming which I was involved with.

The same day, Andy asked me to join him on a phone call. He told me “Allium is me.” I initially thought he meant “This is my project and I would prefer to not work with you on it”. That’s not what he meant.

He revealed that he had been Premiata1 all along. After I had shown interest in finding Allium, he decided to see if he could remember the music and record it himself and found it very easy to do. He then had the idea to catfish me and pretend to be an Italian man who had some limited access to the album (through his sister and her sons) so that I would think I had discovered the original, real album through my own gumption and initiative. He then pretended to have found the actual singer through Antonio de Sarno and wrote false letters between each other to convince me of the backstory of Allium, a story that included the band members getting deported and Allium recording in the same studio as Le Orme. He pretended that the master tapes still existed and played me his home studio recordings pretending that they were the actual band. He then made a lower quality version and added pops and crackles to send me a fake vinyl rip to convince me I was listening to the full original album. He had conversations with me saying he was so happy that I had found this piece of his childhood again. He mocked up a fake version of the album cover to fool me into thinking it was the real thing, and when suspicious elements showed, found ways to convince me that it was the real thing, but slightly edited by Premiata1’s nephew. He made me believe I was working on a project to revive an actual artefact from the 1970s, instead of promoting a ‘fun side-project’ of his and his buddies.

I can’t be sure, but I think he was hoping I’d be impressed that he did all this and managed to fool me. I wasn’t. I was sickened to the core. Everything I had been working on with him had been a lie. I was hoping to put my name to a project that I could be proud of and share with my family and friends. This has now become one of the most traumatic things to ever happen to me. To realise you’ve been living in a fantasy world constructed by someone you considered a close friend is utterly mortifying; you question if you were ever really their friend to begin with.

What I’m talking about is not a few little lies. This was a methodical, pathological world of lies that Andy had me believing for the best part of three months. Ever since the phone call, I’ve looked back over the past three months and realised “THAT must have also been a lie” “What about that?” “That too!”. It’s sickening to think that one of your best friends could do that to you.

Why? Why would someone do that to you? I kept trying to ask this on the phone as Andy grovelled to me about how valuable he considered our friendship and how much he wished he’d never done it. The closest to an answer I got was:

“I guess there must be some sad, lonely part of me that wanted you to like my music. I somehow felt that if you’d known, you wouldn’t have given it the time of day. I know you’re not particularly keen on the Tangent.”

While what he said on the phone seemed to be a very sincere apology for his behaviour, there were simply no words he could have said that would allow me to forgive him for the deep hurt and humiliation I felt. I needed to know what he was willing to do to make it up to me, and he told me that he would publicly apologise to me if necessary. 

He shortly sent me a letter explaining further his intentions when he began lying to me. In the letter he said

“The Premiata1 thing was the beginning of the nightmare, I wanted you to have a response which, as I correctly guessed, you would not have had any other replies. This then became a vehicle in which I could send you a recording and the rest followed. 

I created a back story for the album, because such a release would need one. And  huge amount of the things I did, while undeniably wrong, were done of of genuine respect for you and your knowledge.  Like a medical test with placebos, I wanted to find out at what point the music would fail your test. When you would first notice the artificial instruments.    This is a test that I couldn't have carried out without you "not knowing". But it was of course, an unethical test.”

“The temptation to keep getting your un prejudiced feedback was very strong and I am sad to say I succumbed to it.”

So, essentially he lied and manipulated me for three months just to get some un-prejudiced feedback. And ruined our friendship forever because of it.

After a couple of days of contemplation, I decided that I did want for others to know his actions, because I felt there should be consequences for catfishing, pathological lying and emotional manipulation. I reached out to Andy with suggestions of what I felt the best things he could do for me would be: 1) pull the album completely, because it had been made unethically and was a source of trauma for me that I would see climb the prog charts and get discussed in Prog Magazine and reviewed favourably on ProgArchives or 2) publicly apologise to me, and make sure everyone would know what kind of a person he really was.

I thought that he would at least be willing to go with the second option, as he had made that offer of reparation on the phone, but when I messaged him, he gave me just another, weaker apology for all his bad actions with no promise that he would make any reparations.

I also tried reaching out to his girlfriend Sally, who I had previously enjoyed a working relationship with at DPRP. I had asked her why, if she knew this had been going on, she didn’t try to stop Andy. Andy had told me over the phone that she was firmly on my side about this and was very upset at him. This turned out to be another lie, because her responses to me were even more hurtful than Andy’s apology. She said twice that “Andy is not a liar” (which he absolutely is) and that it was my fault that I was hurt by his lies because I “didn’t understand his intentions”. I would like to ask if there are any intentions that could justify lying to someone pathologically and methodically for three months. She also said that Andy thought I “would understand that artistically he needed to test it out and and to him [I was] the best person because he trusted [me] to tell him as it was - remember you have written really damning reviews of him in the past”. So, because I was critical of his music before, I deserved to be lied to for months. OK.

When I responded to her and pointed out just how hurtful she was being to me, something I felt she should honestly consider, she blocked me, and I then noticed I was blocked from Andy and the Tangent page. So now this project, which I had been considered a “valuable member” and whose inspiration I had apparently provided, was being blocked from me.

As Andy has shown no intention since our initial phone call to publicly apologise and come clean about his disgusting, manipulative behaviour, either to his fans or his fellow musicians, I now feel I must tell my story so that lovers of progressive rock may know that if they choose to buy the Allium album, they are purchasing a product that was, to use Andy’s adjective, made unethically. I don’t want it to be forgotten that Andy would stoop this low to make his 1970s recreation album slightly more authentic. That he could ruin a friendship with lies and betrayal to do that. That he is some sort of ‘prog hero’ without a sinister dark side, that I have been traumatised by. That he will eventually profit off of my trauma.

If you seriously asked him to pull this album completely because you felt betrayed by his "experiment", well that just seems like an overreaction. It's not all about you.

No offense intended, but in a lot of ways it is also not about you. Regardless of whether I think you sound self-important or not, this is a project that involves people other than Andy.

Again, you say that the album was "made in an unethical way". Please explain why you keep saying that, because that's a pretty bold thing to assert. Unless there are more details that you're leaving out surrounding the actual creation of the music and lyrics, it sounds deliberately misleading in my opinion.

If he made a public apology, would you forgive him then?

You're right, you're not obligated to and I wasn't saying that you are. I agree that if Andy misled you, then he should apologize. Being that it wasn't really a public matter until you made it one here, I still fail to see the need for a public apology (other than that you want to make other people know about this one way or another). But I'm not here to try to argue with you or change your mind. I wanted to understand more about the situation.

It's an unfortunate situation. It's probably still pretty fresh on your mind, but I hope that with time and perspective you'll be able to feel better.