The celebrity playlist format is usually a polished lie — a carefully assembled signal of taste, all Coltrane and Joni Mitchell picked for their cultural weight rather than actual emotional history. Vine's version is different in one specific way: almost every entry is anchored to a scene, not a vibe. He played 'Love My Way' 18 times at 5am as the sun came up after an unrequited kiss. He cleared an actual bar with 'Losing My Religion.' These aren't aesthetic choices — they're confessions. The Psychedelic Furs entry is the strongest. 'Love My Way' is precisely the right song for that moment — its dreamlike, slightly desperate romanticism maps perfectly onto the specific agony of being 17, kissed once, and left to process it alone at dawn. The detail of playing it 18 times earns the entry in a way that 'this song just gets me' never could. The Barry Manilow admission is the piece's comic centrepiece and also its most honest moment. Vine doesn't hedge: 'soppy, melodramatic, silly, and I absolutely love it.' The acknowledgment that the key change is 'a car crash' but he doesn't care is the kind of self-aware guilty pleasure confession that only works when the person actually means it. He means it. The Kenny Rogers entry reveals genuine literary attention. Vine doesn't just name 'Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town' — he reads it. He identifies the specific images (the sun going down, the shadow on the wall), the narrator's paralysis from Vietnam, the double bind of begging her to stay while knowing he can't give her what she needs. This is someone who has actually listened to the words, not just absorbed the song as atmosphere. The David Bowie entry is the piece's emotional anchor. Hearing 'Sound and Vision' at 12, struck by the structural strangeness of a singer who doesn't appear until halfway through his own song — that's a real account of aesthetic awakening. The 'Blue, blue, electric blue' opening as the thing that 'awakened' him is specific enough to be believed. The Joan Baez entry about 'Diamonds & Rust' — his reading of it as being about the imbalance of love between Baez and Dylan, and her understanding that 'his greatness excused it all' — shows the same close listening. The format's limitation is also visible: nine entries, nine formats, and the connective tissue between them is thin. This is a listicle, not a portrait. What you get is nine data points from a life, each honest in isolation, but the playlist as a whole doesn't quite resolve into a coherent picture of who this person is or how these songs built each other. The Belinda Carlisle funeral request lands as a punchline rather than a revelation — which is fine, but it's a gear-shift from the Baez entry's genuine emotional weight. BBC Radio 2 in the Park is at City Park, Stirling, on 11 and 13 September.
