Fresh from winning the Best Song Brit Award alongside Olivia Dean for Rein Me In, Sam Fender has now uploaded a brief behind-the-scenes video that gives us a glimpse into how the song was made.
After a quick shot of Fender working on the song’s piano part, we see him practising the electric guitar flourish – a play on the main guitar motif – that you hear in Rein Me In’s second verse. He says that he’s thinking of it as a “response” to the vocals.
As we see him perfecting the part on a Gibson Les Paul Deluxe – quite a niche model, with its mini-humbuckers – Fender is struggling with a quick pickup setting change that he wants to use: from the middle position, with both pickups on, to the bridge pickup. So he asks someone else in his crew to come and flick the switch on his behalf.
“Every time I play a Les Paul or anything I just wanna do, like, AC/DC,” says Fender. We’ll gloss over the fact that AC/DC aren’t actually known for playing Les Pauls – Malcolm Young always played a Gretsch and brother Angus a Gibson SG – as, before long, Fender has ditched his and switched to a different guitar anyway: a Gretsch White Falcon.
This has the TV Jones T-Armond single coil pickups of a '55 Select, but that usually has a Cadillac tailpiece and Fender’s has a Bigsby, which may have been retrofitted.
“I like the bridge, you know, the pickup – it was more dirty,” says someone in the studio, before giving the thumbs-up to Fender as he plays the part with some tremolo thrown in, as you hear on the final record.
This guitar part features on both the original version of Rein Me In, which appears on Fender’s 2025 album, People Watching, and the Olivia Dean rework, which has her singing her own verse and pre-chorus.
Accepting the Best Song Brit Award alongside Dean, Fender said: “I love this song. I wrote it about four years ago and I loved it then. Olivia made it her own, and I just want to say thank you to Olivia and to the fans.”
“I just want to say thank you to Sam – I think this is a beautiful song and it’s just been a pleasure to be part of it,” added Dean.
The collaborative version of Rein Me In began life when Fender and Dean performed it together at the London Stadium on 6 June last year (Dean had been a support act at the show).
After footage of the performance started to gain traction on social media, the two artists repeated the trick at Newcastle’s St James’s Park on 15 June, and the studio version was released on 20 June.
Finally, after 36 weeks in the UK singles chart, the song finally reached Number 1 in February 2026, and continues to ride high on streaming services.
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