“Take this, Marty Bello!” Sam Fender & Olivia Deen’s ‘Rein Me In’ beats Wet Wet’s UK record | UK charts

Sam Fender and Olivia Dean break Wet Wet Wet’s 32-year record of having a British band hold the number one spot on the UK singles chart.

Fender and Dean’s duet Rein Me In achieved its 16th week at number one, beating Wet Wet Wet’s Love is Allaround, which spent 15 weeks at number one in the summer of 1994 after appearing on the Four Weddings and Funeral soundtrack. In contrast to Wet Wet Wet’s back-to-back run, Fender and Dean’s single has slipped in and out of the top spot since February.

“Take this, Marty Bello!” Fender told the Official Charts Company when the news was announced. He added that Rein Me In’s success was “ridiculous – every Friday, it was an excuse to party”.

Rein Me In also recorded the longest consecutive run for a song in the Top 40, with 55 weeks, beating the record held by Ed Sheeran for his song “Thinking Out Loud”.

But Fender and Dean have yet to beat two non-British artists who have the same or greater number one spot in the UK. They tied with Canadian Bryan Adams, whose (All I Do) I Do It For You spent 16 consecutive weeks at the top in 1991 – like Wet Wet Wet, Adams’ song was a vulgar power ballad backed by prominent film placement, in Adams’ case Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

American singer Frankie Laine has the longest run at number one, with 18 non-consecutive weeks in 1953 for his epic song “I Believe” (“For every raindrop that falls / A flower that grows…”), when the UK chart only had 12 songs.

Rein Me In began life as an album track on Fender’s 2025 Mercury Prize-winning EP, People Watching. A devastating, mid-tempo number about the self-sabotage of a romantic relationship, showcasing Fender’s talent for kitchen-sink poetry: “Every stone in this city bears our prints / And all the bars around here serve my ghosts and my corpse… I’m working on sweet, warm bliss / All my memories of you ring like tinnitus.”

Dean added her own verse, voicing the other character in the relationship, and the duet was released as a single in June 2025. “Olivia putting the alternative narrative on her made the song really universal — which opened the floodgates,” Fender told the Official Charts Company. “There are two sides to the story.” The duo also performed it together at Fender Stadium concerts in Newcastle and London, and it won them Song of the Year at the Brit Awards in February.

Dean enjoyed major chart success alongside Rein Me In: her single Man I Need topped the chart in October 2025, and her original album The Art of Loving had an amazing run, not leaving the top five since its release that same month, including eight weeks at number one. This year, she won three more Brit Awards, as well as three Mobos and a Grammy for Best New Artist.

Rein Me In’s long-term success is even more impressive given that the Official Charts Company introduced a rule in 2017 to prevent songs from lasting too long and making the charts look stale.

After a song has been in the Top 100 for 10 weeks, if it experiences three weeks of lower streaming numbers in a row, the value the official chart company attributes to the streams is cut in half – so a song essentially requires twice as many streams to maintain the same level of chart success. It’s a somewhat controversial metric, as a song can still be very popular in real terms, but be beaten out in the Top 40 by songs with lower streaming numbers.

Since the rule was implemented, only four songs have surpassed the past 10 weeks at number one: Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits,” Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” featuring Justin Bieber, and Tones & I’s “Dance Monkey,” all of which managed 11 weeks, while Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” managed 13 weeks last year.

Elsewhere in this week’s singles charts, Oasis’s “Wonderwall” reached No. 11 after being broadcast at the conclusion of England’s victorious World Cup matches, while the official song of this year’s World Cup, Dai Dai by Shakira and Burna Boy, was at No. 13, and Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds’ Three Lions hit No. 21. American country singer Ella Langley had her first top-five single in the UK with Choosin’ Texas, and Journey’s 1981 hit “Don’t Stop Believin'” made an unexpected return to the charts at No. 27 thanks to a wave of virality online.

Madonna debuted at number one on the album chart with Confessions II, the follow-up to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, returning her to the top after her previous two albums only reached number two. She became the first American artist to have albums in the United Kingdom in five decades.

She triumphed in a chart battle with Sienna Spiro, the traditional-style British pop singer whose debut album Visitor had the biggest UK debut of the year, but could only reach No. 2.