Beyoncé has scored her first UK No 1 in 14 years with her new country single, Texas Hold ’Em.
The song, which features Beyoncé line dancing through life’s problems with a whiskey in hand, has jumped from No 9 in its second week of release, and is the first country song to reach UK No 1 since Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road in 2019. Beyoncé was last at No 1 in 2010 with her Lady Gaga duet Telephone, and her last solo No 1 was If I Were a Boy in 2008.
While remaining an iconic and much-discussed figure in the intervening years, her commercial clout dipped slightly in the UK, with her albums 4, Beyoncé, Lemonade and The Lion King: The Gift only producing two Top 10 hits between them. But the dance music-obsessed UK warmed to her foray into house music on 2022 album Renaissance: the singles Break My Soul and Cuff It both reached the UK Top Five.
Texas Hold ’Em, due to be included on the second part of the Renaissance album trilogy, is proving globally popular, too. It is second only to Beautiful Things by American singer-songwriter Benson Boone in Spotify’s global Top 50, and to Jack Harlow’s Lovin On Me in the US Hot 100.
It is also currently top of the US country chart, the first time a Black woman has achieved that feat.
After the song’s release, Beyoncé’s mother Tina underlined her daughter’s country music credentials on Instagram, writing: “We have always celebrated cowboy culture growing up in Texas. We also always understood that it was not just about it belonging to white culture only. In Texas there is a huge black cowboy culture. Why do you think that my kids have integrated it into their fashion and art since the beginning. When people ask why is Beyoncé wearing cowboy hats? … it’s been there since she was a kid, we went to rodeos every year and my whole family dressed in western fashion.”
Elsewhere in the chart, Boone’s torrid and anthemic hit rises to No 2 in the UK this week, and Dua Lipa’s latest single Training Season enters at No 4 in its first week of release. Stranger Things actor Joe Keery, who plays Steve Harrington in the series, reaches the Top 20 for the first time with his musical project DJO – his song End of Beginning jumps 89 places to No 11.
In the album chart, Bristol punks Idles reach No 1 with Tangk, their second chart-topper after 2020’s Ultra Mono. Paloma Faith earns a sixth Top 10 album with The Glorification of Sadness, at No 2, and Liverpool rockers Crawlers reach No 7 with their debut The Mess We Seem to Make. Bob Marley’s best-of compilation Legend re-enters the Top 10 off the back of the biopic Bob Marley: One Love, in its 1,122nd non-consecutive week on the chart.
