So, Mr Humperdinck, do your mates call you Engelbert? The 87-year-old smiles. Growing up in colonial India, he was plain old Arnold Dorsey. After moving to Leicester and starting his music career in the Fifties, he started to go by Jerry Dorsey, thanks to a killer impersonation of Jerry Lee Lewis. Then, in 1965, he borrowed the name of a 19th-century German composer and became known to the world as Engelbert Humperdinck, going on to sell more than 140 million records. Friends and family call him “Enge” (to rhyme with Penge) — but to Emin Agalarov, the Azerbaijani singer with whom he has recorded a duet for a new Elvis Presley covers album, he is “Engie”.
Humperdinck has been churning out lush, angsty ballads for
