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Sam Fender is Olivia Dean broke Wet Wet Wet’s record of 32 years at British singles at No 1 in the UK singles chart.
Fender and Dean’s song Rein Me In broke its 16th week at No 1, beating Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around, which spent 15 weeks at No 1 in the summer of 1994 after appearing on Four Songs for a Wedding and a Funeral. Unlike Wet Wet Wet’s consecutive run, Fender and Dean’s song has dropped in and out of the top since February.
“Take that, Marty Pellow!” Fender told the Official Charts Company when the news was announced. He added that the success of Rein Me In has been “ridiculous – every Friday, it’s been an excuse to party”.
Rein Me In also achieved the longest consecutive run in the Top 40, with 55 weeks, beating Ed Sheeran’s record for his ballad Thinking Out Loud.
But Fender and Dean have to beat two non-UK players with equal or greater speed to the UK No 1 spot. He is similar to Canadian Bryan Adams, whose (Everything I Do) I Do It For You spent 16 consecutive weeks at the top in 1991 – like Wet Wet Wet, Adams’ song was a powerful song supported by a popular film, in the case of Adams Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
US pop star Frankie Laine had the longest run at No 1, with 18 consecutive weeks in 1953 for his magical song I Believe (“for every drop of rain that falls / a flower grows…”), back when the UK chart had just 12 singles.
Rein Me In began life as an album track on Fender’s chart-topping, Mercury prize winner 2025 release People Are Watching. A meandering mid-century number about the destruction of a romantic relationship, it showcases Fender’s mastery of kitchen poetry: “Every stone in this town has our records / And all the bars around here serve my ghosts and corpses…
Dean added his verse, showing another picture in the relationship, and the duet was released as a single in June 2025. “Olivia putting another story on it made the song real – that opened doors,” Fender told the Official Charts Company. “There are two sides to this story.” The pair also performed together at the Fender stadium concerts in Newcastle and London, and won them song of the year at the Brit Awards in February.
Dean has enjoyed his biggest success with Rein Me In: his single Man I Need topped the charts in October 2025 with his parent’s album. The Art of Love has had an incredible run, never leaving the top five since it was released that month, including eight weeks at No 1. This year he won three more Brit awards, including three Mobos and a Grammy for new artist.
Rein Me In’s long-term success is all the more surprising given that the Official Charts Company introduced a rule in 2017 to prevent songs from taking too long and making the charts unstable.
After a song has been in the Top 100 for 10 weeks, if it has three consecutive weeks of declining streaming numbers, the Official Charts Company’s estimated value of streams is halved – so the song needs twice as many streams to be successful. It’s a controversial metric, because a song can be very popular in real terms, but be beaten in the Top 40 by songs with lower numbers.
Since the rule was introduced, only four songs have lasted more than 10 weeks at No 1: Ed Sheeran’s Bad Bad, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s Despacito featuring Justin Bieber, and Tones & I’s Dance Monkey all managed 11 weeks, while Alex Warren’s Ordinary-week managed 13 last year.
Elsewhere in the singles charts this week, Oasis’ Wonderwall is at number 11 after being aired at the end of England’s World Cup victory, while this year’s official World Cup song, Dai Dai by Shakira and Burna Boy, is at number 13 and Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds’ Three Lions and Three Lions US Choosin’ Texas, and Journey’s 1981 hit Don’t Stop Believin’ make an unexpected return to the charts at No 27 due to the increase in the Internet.
Madonna is No. 1 in the album chart and Acceptance IIHer follow-up was 2005’s Confessions on the Dance Floor, bringing her back to the top after her previous two albums had both reached No 2. She became the first US female artist to score a UK No 1 album in fifty years.
She won the battle against Sienna Spiro, a British singer known for her first single. A stranger became the UK’s best single of the year, but only reached No 2.
