Nobody's Producer: The Watchful Eyes of Stealing Due Credit

The glow of the old school CRT monitor cast an almost sacred light on our faces, and later the Philips TV, the screen for a digital aurora in the box-room. I remember the specific thrum of the PlayStation, the click of its disc drive, and the rhythmic, almost hypnotic sequence of button presses as I meticulously layered beats and melodies. This was for his GCSE music project, a task he’d presented with a shrug and an almost imperceptible plea for help. He didn't do or say much; he rarely did. He just sat there, knees pulled up to his chest on the floor, watching me, a silent, still observer as I sculpted a rudimentary track from the limited palette of an early 2000s music creation game.

His presence was like a barely perceptible hum in the room, a quiet witness to the genesis of something out of nothing. I remember thinking, in that precise moment, that he was involved. Not creatively, not actively, but his quiet watchfulness, his unblinking gaze, felt like a silent endorsement, a grounding presence that perhaps even subtly influenced the direction of a melody or the placement of a drum fill. He got a decent grade, I think. We high-fived, a momentary, almost perfunctory celebration. And then, the memory, like so many others from adolescence, receded into the background.

Until it didn’t.

That quiet observation, that shared space of creation, seemingly etched a different memory into Thomas than it did into me. It became the seed of a quiet, unacknowledged battle – the fact that I continued to dabble, to create, to find a voice in music, and he… well, he probably never touched production software again. That disparity, I've come to realise, festered. It grew into a quiet resentment, a shadow of an unfulfilled desire he couldn't articulate, or perhaps, couldn't even consciously acknowledge in himself.

Now, years later, that memory has mutated into something truly bizarre. Thomas, who barely grunted a word that evening, is active in the background of my life, a phantom limb of my creative output. He’s the phantom producer, the silent genius behind my tracks. It manifests in ridiculous, almost theatrical ways: vague, knowing nods to mutual acquaintances, and probably, cryptic comments about, "our early sessions", and the occasional, truly deranged, claim that he was the one who taught me about audio or introduced me to a particular sound. And he’s got a small cadre of believers, or at least polite listeners, among a few 'losers' from high school – the ones who were present for the brief, liminal period when the GCSE project briefly intersected with their consciousness. They might vaguely remember being told about, "Thomas’s music project", and now, in their minds, that’s translated into Thomas being the progenitor of all things musical from our shared past.

It’s a peculiar form of haunting. His silence on that box-room floor has amplified into a cacophony of imagined credit, a desperate attempt to claim ownership of a moment he merely observed. It's not malicious, I don't think. More tragic, really. It’s the lingering echo of a road not taken, a creative spark that never ignited for him, now projected onto the one who was just there, pressing the buttons. And so, the ghost of Thomas, the high school producer, continues his pantomime, convinced that his quiet presence in that glowing room was not just involvement, but the very essence of creation itself.