Twenty-three weeks, and a record that had stood since 1953.
The question sounds like trivia until you watch a song refuse to leave. On the Official UK Singles Chart published on 4 September 2026, the answer is settled: Rein Me In, by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean, spent 23 non-consecutive weeks at number one. No single in the history of that chart had done that before, and the number is not a tie.
The duet arrived in June 2025. Fender had first sung the song alone on People Watching, released that February, and Dean added a second voice. It did not reach the summit until the chart of 20 February 2026, the same season it won the Brit Award for Song of the Year. The label was Polydor. The climb itself took months, which makes the stay at the top stranger, not easier.
The mark it broke had looked immovable. Frankie Laine’s I Believe spent 18 weeks at number one in 1953, when the chart was barely a year old. Bryan Adams held 16 weeks in 1991 with (Everything I Do) I Do It for You. Wet Wet Wet held 15 in 1994 with Love Is All Around. At week 23, Rein Me In also passed the combined 22 weeks of every version of I Believe, Laine’s 18 plus four by Robson and Jerome in 1995.
The run was not a straight line. In March 2026, Harry Styles’s American Girls took the top for a week, and the song came back. Streaming-era rules were built to stop exactly this kind of reign, halving a track’s value once it has lived too long near the summit. Rein Me In kept returning anyway, week after week, past every British and American name on the old list.
On 4 September 2026, Ella Langley’s Choosin’ Texas took number one and Rein Me In fell to number seven. The tally closed at 23. That figure is the whole story: a North East voice and a London one, holding a summit Frankie Laine had seemed to own for seventy-three years.
