Introduction
“It’s a complete hopelessness. You just can’t see any joy in anything.” Ben McGarvey’s words hang in the air with a quiet resonance that anyone familiar with depression will recognise. Performing under the name Minute Taker, Ben creates a signature blend of retro synth pop that carries both the warmth of nostalgia and the weight of lived experience—haunting piano melodies and emotionally charged lyrics that manage to “grab your heart and make you dance” simultaneously.
Ben’s candour is disarming. From the opening moments of his conversation with Dan Hall on In the Key of Q, he speaks with the kind of unguarded honesty that feels like a late-night talk with an old friend—one who understands that sometimes the most universal experiences are the ones we struggle most to put into words.
The Unexpected Synth Kid
Growing up in rural environments—first the Wirral until he was eight, then Shropshire—Ben found himself mysteriously drawn to synthesizer music that seemed wholly disconnected from his surroundings. “I always felt like I was in the wrong era and in the wrong place and just everything was wrong,” he explains, describing himself as the “uncool kid in the 90s still listening to all the 80s stuff” while everyone else was into Blur and Oasis.
This musical orientation set him apart in more ways than one. As “an only child” who was “always a bit at odds with everything and everyone,” Ben found that music offered a private sanctuary. “I’d just walk for hours listening to albums. I’d just wander around in the hills and the woods just completely immersed in this music.”
“I was a huge fan of Tina Turner, and I was in the fan club. How my parents didn’t know I was gay, I’ll never know.” – Ben McGarvey
The connection between his synth-love and sense of difference emerges gradually throughout the interview. Growing up during the era of Section 28—the UK legislation that prohibited “promotion of homosexuality” in schools—left young gay people like Ben without language, support, or representation. “These were the days of Section 28. So there was an element of feeling like a freak. And [of being] just some kind of terrible human being for having those feelings.”
Music as Therapy and Representation
What began as escape evolved into expression. Ben describes discovering an old piano in his family’s basement: “I used to just go down there. I used to just play around on it, like I had no idea what I was doing, but it just became like a little place to escape.”
For Ben, creating music became both therapy and mission. Having grown up without seeing himself represented in music, he made a conscious decision early in his career: “I was very set on making sure I would never shy away from addressing my songs to a man.” When Dan asks why this mattered to him, Ben’s response is immediate: “Because I didn’t have it when I was growing up, and I just wanted it so much.”
This commitment to authentic representation has shaped his artistic path, including his album “Wolf Hours” and its accompanying audiovisual project exploring “the inner worlds of gay men at different points in time” from World War I through the 20th century.
“It’s fascinating… especially when it was all going on before it was legal, and people really did lead these completely double lives.” – Ben McGarvey
The Melancholy and the Dance
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ben’s music is its embrace of emotional complexity. When Dan observes the sense of melancholy in his work, Ben acknowledges his lifelong struggle with depression while noting that “melancholy can be so beautiful” and exists on a “knife’s edge of darkness.”
His description of depression is both poetic and painfully accurate: “It’s just like a spell. It’s so powerful.” This isn’t the sanitised version of mental health challenges, but rather the raw reality—where “sometimes even plumping up a pillow is too much” and “you don’t even want to do nothing… you just don’t really want to exist.”
Yet within this darkness, Ben creates music that connects and comforts. As he explains to Dan, finding melancholic music when in dark spaces can be deeply comforting rather than depressing—perhaps because it offers the representation that was so scarce in his early life: “It’s finding something that you identify with, on an emotional level.”
What piece of music has been your emotional lifeline during difficult times? What music has been your sanctuary? Whether it’s an album that saw you through a dark period, a song that seemed to understand you when no one else did, or an artist whose work made you feel less alone. Leave a note in the comments.
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