EXETER LIVES DJ extraordinaire Paul Giblin gets chatty

“Culturally Exeter punches well above its weight”

PAUL GIBLIN Pink Floyd obsessive Paul Giblin knows a thing or two about Exeter and its residents – he’s director of local radio station Phonic FM and works in adult social care locally. We caught up with him to find out about his love for the city…

Whereabouts do you live? I live in the Heavitree part of Exeter, which I love. For me it’s special because our neighbours are all friendly, as are most of the people I meet when out and about in that part of the city. It’s also the part of Exeter that I lived in for my second and third years as a student many years ago.

Tell us about your day job… My role is with Devon County Council where I have the job title of involvement manager for adult social care. I manage a great team that is responsible for ensuring that people who use adult social care services have a say on the development of those services. At its best, it’s incredibly rewarding to empower people, at its worst it means having to explain tough decisions to people whose lives are affected by them. It’s never boring and during the pandemic I was deployed into the role of communications lead for our adult social care cell, which was an extremely full-on role – as I’m sure you can imagine.

And Phonic FM? As a founding director of Phonic FM I am one of five board members who all do our bit to keep the station afloat, so we all multi-task. My major roles are acting as company secretary and working with our accountant to keep us solvent and administratively sound. The role I relish most is organising many of our fundraising benefit gigs, which I promote under the guise of The Future Sound of Exeter. I also speak on behalf of the station at public events and I host my own weekly Future Sound of Exeter show and am a co-host for The Respect Show, having co-ordinated Exeter Respect festival from 2003 to 2013.

What have you learnt about Exeter through your roles? With my social care hat on I think Exeter is essentially a caring city with a well-developed voluntary sector that arises from a strong community spirit. With my Phonic FM hat on I think that Exeter contains a lot of creative people and culturally it punches well above its weight for its population size and location. I love it!

Any positives that you’ve taken from the last few months? I’ve always done a fair amount of drawing and during lockdown I started drawing the plants in my garden, which has given me a lot of pleasure, has doubled-up as a mindfulness activity and has been well-received when posted on social media.

Where are your favourite places to eat, drink and shop in Exeter? I love the food in the Cork & Tile Portuguese café on Gandy Street, the décor in The Glorious Art House café on Fore Street, the creative company to be found in the Exeter Phoenix café bar, and the racks in Rooster Records on Fore Street are always far too tempting.

Who would play you in a film about your life? I’m not very good at recognising actors but Jeff Goldblum has been great in every film I’ve seen him in and would deliver the required level of sarcasm and puns.

What great thing about Exeter does not receive enough attention? The Urban and Rural Plants exotic plant centre, with its stunning array of weird vegetation.

What band do we need to listen to? As a Pink Floyd obsessive, I am adamant that we can never listen to enough Floyd, and anyone who likes the early stuff really needs to listen to Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets if they have yet to do so.

Times are uncertain at the moment, what do you know for certain? Karl Marx’s old phrase “nothing is certain but change” springs to mind, but I’m certain that as long as we have an arts centre to broadcast from, there will be enough volunteers to keep Phonic FM on air as Exeter’s sound alternative. n

For more: www.phonic.fm