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Engelbert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, May 2, 1936, Madras, India) is a well-known pop singer who rose to international fame during the 1960s and 1970s, after adopting the name of the famous German opera composer Engelbert Humperdinck as his own stage name. He was one of ten children of British Army officer Mervyn Dorsey and his wife Olive. His family moved to Leicester, England, when he was 10, and a year later he showed an interest in music and began learning the saxophone. By the early 1950s he was playing in nightclubs, but is believed not to have tried singing until he was 17 and friends coaxed him into entering a pub contest. His impression of Jerry Lewis prompted friends to begin calling him Gerry Dorsey, a name he worked under for almost a decade. His budding music career was interrupted when he served in the British military in the mid-1950s, but he got his first chance to record in 1958 with Decca Records. His first single, "I`ll Never Fall in Love Again," was not a hit, but Dorsey and the label reunited almost a decade later with far different results. Dorsey continued working the clubs until 1961, when he was stricken with tuberculosis. He regained his health and returned to club work with little success, but in 1965 he teamed with former roommate Gordon Mills who had become a music impresario and the manager of Tom Jones. He had his first real success in July 1966, in Belgium where he and four others represented England in the annual Knokke song contest, and in October he was on stage in Mechelen. In that period, Humperdinck was already No. 1 in the Belgian charts, six months before the release of Release Me. Belgian Television then made a video clip in the harbour of Zeebrugge.
Biography Credit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbert_Humperdinck_(singer)
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