💥Engelbert Humperdinck: “I’m Not Jealous of Tom Jones”

Visitors to House of Kong, the current East London exhibition that takes fans on a magical mystery tour of 25 years of Gorillaz, will see and hear many things. But one thing is sadly missing from the multi-media extravaganza: the creamy, crushed-velvet, supper-club tones of Engelbert Humperdinck.

“I wrote this really big, epic string ballad,” Gorillaz figurehead Damon Albarn told an Australian radio station as he promoted the 2010 album Plastic Beach. “I thought Engelbert Humperdinck would be fantastic on it. Well, he got the tune, and we thought he was going to do it… In the end it just didn’t work out, because he only comes to England once a year, and that’s fair enough. He didn’t want to be faffing around in the studio with somebody he wasn’t entirely [sure of].”

“Absolutely not true!” retorts Humperdinck, his indignation palpable all the way from Los Angeles, when I read this quote to him. “At that time, I had signed with another manager, and this manager knew nothing about music. So when the Gorillaz approached him to do the duet with me, he turned it down without even speaking to me,” the singer insists, eyebrows rising towards a cloud of chestnut brown hair, the outrage crinkling those still lustrous, Seventies-style mutton-chops. “Never even spoke to me about it. And when I heard about it, you know how long he lasted? Five minutes. Gone. I kicked him out. That prompted me to get rid of him.”

Well, I tell Humperdinck, when he couldn’t land his first-choice singer, Albarn decided to abandon that song. But the Blur man has recently been talking up a new Gorillaz album, so maybe the collaboration could ride again? “Oh, please God, yeah. Could you talk to them?” Humperdinck laughs.

The Last Waltz?

Not that the 89-year-old is sitting around, waiting for offers. He’s an old-fashioned, big-lunged crooner who came up at the same time as the Beatles – he halted their run of number one singles when, in 1967’s Summer of Love, his signature easy listening anthem Release Me outsold Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane. But he never took the easy option, with dozens of album releases and decades slogging through Las Vegas residencies and international tours. He even took a punt, in 2012, on the poisoned chalice that is representing the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest. In Baku he came 25th out of 26th. But with 150 million records sold in 60 years, who’s counting?

The Sixties sex bomb, born Arnold Dorsey in Empire-era India and raised in Leicester, is currently in the midst of yet another world tour. This one is named after his 1967 chart-topper The Last Waltz, although he’s now regretting calling it that.

“I tell you what happened,” begins the singer, a sprightly, summery vision in white-spotted pink shirt. “The first part of the year was a little quiet, and I was climbing the walls. I called my manager and said: ‘This is definitely not going to be the last waltz for me. I’m capable of travelling. I’m still fit and well – I’m touching wood when I say that – and I’d like to continue doing the thing that I love to do. And that’s sing around the world.’”

Next month, he’s performing in Birmingham, which is not too far away from his house in Leicester: “I’m excited about that. I can’t wait to get home again, have a pint and a bag of crisps.”

From the Pink Palace to Leicester

Humperdinck, whose worth was once estimated to be $100m, is beaming in from a wood-panelled room in his Bel Air property. It’s a smaller home than the one he lived in between 1975 and 2004. That LA house, known as the Pink Palace – a 40-room mansion with a heart-shaped swimming pool – had previous owners including George Harrison and the actress Jayne Mansfield. “It was a beautiful house. Very Hollywood. My children grew up in that house, and they loved it,” he says.

In fact, Humperdinck’s association with the Hollywood starlet ran even longer than those 29 years. When he went to see her perform one night in the summer of 1967, the pair’s eyes met across a crowded LA nightclub. “She even sat on my lap during the show. I thought: my God, I’ve got this amazing sex symbol sitting on my lap.” They then had dinner after her show, with Mansfield inviting the Englishman to come visit her at home the next time he was in town. Two weeks later she was dead, killed in a car crash.

Fast-forward six decades: the recent documentary My Mom Jayne, directed by her daughter Mariska Hargitay, also an actress, told the story of the return to the family, courtesy of Humperdinck, of a piano that once belonged to Mansfield. As he explains it, he had bought the piano from her estate. “And it was a Gershwin piano – I believe Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue on it. I had the piano for 29 years. But Mariska’s husband got in touch and wanted to buy it off me. So I sold it to them, and it’s gone back to the owners, back to the original family.”

Did he make some money on that? “Actually, I sold it for the same price as I bought it [for], although it was quite expensive when I bought it: 80 grand.”

As for his current home: he downsized here after the death, four years ago, of his wife, Patricia. They married in 1964, and she lived with Alzheimer’s for 10 years before contracting Covid in early 2021. Little wonder the man wants to keep busy.

“[The loss] changed my whole way of thinking, my whole way of reading a lyric. Because each song that I do seems to apply to the situation,” says the singer, whose repertoire includes the songs A Man Without Love, The Way It Used to Be and Forever and Ever (And Ever). “It’s more real now than it’s ever been. The reason why I want to work, I want to carry on doing this until God calls me, is because I love to do it. It’s my way of life. I enjoy writing poetry. But I don’t think I’ll be satisfied in my life just sitting at home doing nothing.”

Humperdinck first started performing in America in 1968, relocating there full-time not long afterwards. “Although I don’t consider it my home; my home is definitely Leicester.” His move was one of financial necessity, not artistic choice. “In those days, when I first got successful, there was a super-tax – 90 per cent or something. It was ridiculous, people couldn’t survive on that. I wanted to be successful and keep what I was earning. I did 300 concerts a year when I first started. And most of [the earnings] would have gone in taxes. So it was a management move. Gordon Mills said: ‘We better go somewhere where we can keep the money a bit more.’”

From Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley

Mills was the friend and impresario who started managing the singer, then going by the stage name Gerry Dorsey, in 1965. Their partnership was tested early on when Humperdinck heard a new song co-written by German songwriter Bert Kaempfert. He was convinced that Strangers in the Night was a smash, but Mills told him it had already been claimed by another singer.

“I think there’s a lot more to that than meets the eye,” says Humperdinck carefully of that long-ago switcheroo. First, “I’d already recorded it, but they can’t find the tape… But when Gordon Mills said to me, ‘You can’t have it,’ I said: ‘But Gordon, it’s a definite number one.’ He says: ‘Well, Sinatra wants it.’ I think there was a little cash involved in that – Sinatra paid for it.”

Did he ever come across Frank Sinatra during his time in Vegas? “Oh, yeah. I came across him a lot. I used to play in his golf tournaments. Sinatra was a very unusual person. I can’t believe how much power this man had. He just dominated the business.”

Was Humperdinck intimidated by him? “I wasn’t afraid of him. I just put up with, ah, what you have to put up with,” he says with a shrug. There were much better relations with Sinatra’s fellow Rat Packers, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. “In all the people of the past, Dean was probably my favourite. I used to dine with him quite a lot over here, at La Famiglia, a restaurant in LA. Because his agent was my agent. My agent used to say: ‘I’m having dinner with Dean tonight. You want to come?’ Do I want to come? Course I do!”

Humperdinck and Mills’s relationship was a fruitful partnership, until it wasn’t. The saga of its unravelling emerges when our conversation turns to his friendship with Elvis Presley – another “lovely, lovely guy”. Humperdinck says: “I learnt a lot from watching Elvis. I always took notes. He was probably the best performer I ever saw on stage. He was good at what he did, and confident, but not conceited.”

He adds: “When somebody asked him, ‘Who are your friends in showbusiness?’, he always mentioned me. He said the reason for that was that I reminded him of the twin brother he lost at birth. But I think it’s the sideburns,” he adds with a twinkle.

“I saw some of his movies,” he continues. “When I first became successful in [America], Gordon Mills was getting a lot of scripts for me. But he used to dump them. He didn’t want me to be six months, eight months in the [film] studio – because then you’re making money for them.”

‘Ageing sex bombs at war’

So, for all his successes on the small screen – in the fashion of the early 1970s, Humperdinck hosted his own all-star variety shows on American and British television – “that’s how it finished up: I didn’t do any movies. I would have loved that part of my life to be in movies”.

Does the singer ever regret heeding Mills’s suggestion that he should call himself Engelbert Humperdinck (the name pinched from the 19th-century German operatic composer)? Billy Fury it wasn’t. “No. He was a genius in that respect. He started with me very well. We were best buddies. He was my best man, I was his best man. But I think he got so powerful with having this stable of me, Tom Jones and Gilbert O’Sullivan. But it was a big company, money went to his head, and he got too big for his boots.”

Jones, pointedly, is not another lovely, lovely guy. Which brings up another reason for Humperdinck’s split from Mills. “He had different ideas about [my career]. He was very partial to Tom – they were both Welsh – and I guess there was a closeness there. I felt a little bit left out, that both the reins weren’t together – one was here and one is here. Therefore, I got a bit upset, and I left the organisation.” (Humperdinck split from his manager in 1977 and, he says, “lost a fortune”; Mills died nine years later.)

So Mills was favouring Jones over you? “Oh yeah, without a doubt. Mind you, I think Tom Jones is a great performer, great singer, great everything. Although we’re not friends, I still think he’s probably one of the best singers the world has ever known. And I always will say that. I’m not jealous of him, in fact.”

Humperdinck has changed his tune. Early in 2024 he was quoted as saying of Sir Tom: “I think he’s lost his voice. I don’t think he’s got it anymore.” It was the latest salvo in – as the tabloid headline had it – an “ageing sex bombs at war” saga that has rumbled on for decades, long after they were labelmates on Decca Records.

As for that that “sex bomb” appellation: that’s a harder one for Humperdinck to defuse. His 2011 memoir contained details of his “string of affairs and one-night stands”. As he later put it, he’d had “more paternity suits than casual suits”, and had some serious “making up” to do with his wife over his womanising. Last year an ex-girlfriend of Jones’s claimed that, around 1980, Humperdinck made a pass at her – adding fuel to the feud. Jones, clearly still furious, recently told a a newspaper: “There’s nothing friendly about him and I. He’s a p—-, quote me on that.”

Today, though, Humperdinck takes the high road, saying it’s Jones’s “choice” to refuse his olive branch. “I wish it wasn’t the way, but it is what it is. I don’t like to hold grudges. Life is too short for that sort of the thing.”