He delivered some of his other greatest hits with equal enthusiasm: hanging out in cafes in London’s Tinpan Alley with the Rolling Stones before they were famous; borrowing furniture from the shop downstairs so his unfurnished, unlit, flat didn’t look so decrepit for the press conference after his first hit Release Me first went to No 1; the 1972 Rolls-Royce Corniche he bought when he first became mega-rich, which he still drives to this day, and which has the numberplate EH1.
This is the very essence of what’s needed to become and remain a star for 60 years: to know what your audience wants and give it to them relentlessly.
But he’s not just a star. He’s a man who has lived a big and fabulous life that has already gone on for more years than most of us will be lucky enough to get. From the outside, it looks like he’s won big at the casino of life, but a strong argument could be made that he’s lost a lot more.
Everything changed after the massive global success of Release Me in 1967. That was when he moved from his unfurnished flat in the working-class area of Hammersmith to a mansion in exclusive St George’s Hill, among the Beatles and many of Britain’s richest and most famous.
By the end of the following year, he was a global superstar. He’d released hit after hit after hit, including The Last Waltz, There Goes My Everything, A Man Without Love and Am I That Easy to Forget. In New Zealand, Ten Guitars, the B-side of Release Me, became such a massive hit and so ubiquitous that many New Zealanders to this day believe it to be a New Zealand song.
He became massively rich. At his peak, he says, he had almost anything he wanted: “aeroplanes, hotels, Burger Kings, all that business”. But then he left his manager Gordon Mills, because he felt Mills favoured his other star client, Tom Jones.
He summarises Mills’ transgression thus: “When you have two race horses, you’ve got to keep them together – not let one go here and keep one back here.”
Mills is the one who gave him his stage name Engelbert Humperdinck, having borrowed it from the German composer, who wrote the opera Hansel and Gretel and died in 1921. The passport of the modern-day Humperdinck reads: “Arnold George Dorsey also known as Engelbert Humperdinck professionally.”
The split from Mills, he says, cost him everything. “I gave it all up and had to start again, more or less.”
His lifelong rift with Tom Jones is well-known, but the rift with Mills was far more significant. It was never healed: Mills died in 1986. “So much talent gone and so much money buried away,” Humperdinck said.
British singer Engelbert Humperdinck in his LA home in 1979. Photo / Getty
I have been a journalist for more than 20 years. I can think of only one person I’ve interviewed who was older than Humperdinck’s 90. That interview was for a story about what it was like to be old. I have never interviewed any performer in their 90s and can’t think of any who were even in their 80s.
The interview was conducted over Zoom. He was in the middle of a run of press interviews and when I connected, an assistant informed me he was in the toilet. As I waited for him to appear, I thought back to his days of chart domination and cultural ubiquity, and to his high standing in the cassette rack next to my parents’ stereo in the 1980s, when he was already well into middle age but still a heart-throb in wide-lapelled suits. I wondered if he would still look like he did on the cover of that cassette.
When he arrived on my screen, I was shocked by how good he looked; how much he resembled the Humperdinck I knew from decades ago. He could easily have passed for 80. He told me he works out in his pool every other day, doing what he alternately described as “aerobics” and “martial arts moves”.
He is in the midst of one of the intermittent resurgences in fame that will happen if you create enough cultural landmarks and live long enough to see them co-opted, repurposed, remixed and reimagined by and for a new generation.
In his case, this happened most recently in 2022, when A Man Without Love was used in the hit Marvel television series Moon Knight. He describes being discovered by the younger generation as “wonderful”.
“It’s been a great journey”, he says. “I hope it never ends.”
Before her death in 2021, at the age of 85, his wife Patricia had spent years battling dementia. He fought it with all the resources and money at his disposal, trying treatments as diverse as stem cells and acupuncture. She contracted Covid-19 and died, he says, of a damaged heart.
He says he still misses her tremendously and thinks about her often, including on stage. He says that in 1993, long before her illness, he wrote her a song. He says it’s called … what is it called?
He can’t remember. He says: “I’ve just had a blackout. Can you believe that?” He calls out, “What’s the name of that song?”
There is no reply. He says: “No one is listening to me.”
But of course, that is not true and has not been true since at least 1967. I am listening and so are you and in a few weeks so too will thousands of New Zealanders who will have paid up to $286 to attend one of his concerts. Many of us will go on listening until he has nothing left to say.
Suddenly, it comes to him. Or does someone give it to him? It doesn’t matter. I am in the midst of asking him a question when he cuts me off mid-sentence.
It’s called Everywhere I Go. He wrote it for her in life but the words are maybe even more fitting in death. When he performs it on stage, he says, he isn’t always able to finish it.
He speaks the lyrics: “Memories of your love haunt me night and day. Everywhere I go, everywhere I go.” He clears his throat. He says: “Anyway, that’s the song.” He has nothing more to say.
Engelbert Humperdinck performs on The Celebration Tour in Wellington on June 26, Christchurch on June 28 and Auckland on June 30. Tickets available from ticketmaster.co.nz