Chart entered : 26 January 1967
Chart peak : 1
Number of hits : 17
Ho hum. Sometimes you just have to make yourself a brew and get on with it. The prospect of toiling through seven pre-fame singles by an artist who's never interested me in the slightest, leading up to one of the least-loved ( at least by anyone still alive ) number ones , doesn't set my pulse racing. But Engelbert is an important part of the charts' story, a reminder that not everybody bowed down to the Beatles and what they represented. There was a counter-counter culture at work here ; is it just a coincidence that Engelbert's chart positions tail off dramatically after Ted Heath's election victory ?
Arnold Dorsey was born in Madras in 1936 to a British Army officer and his wife. They relocated to Leicester just after the war. He started out as a saxophonist in the early fifties. He picked up the tag "Gerry" from his impersonations of Jerry Lewis. In the mid-fifties he did his national service in the Royal Corps of Signals and got his first chance to record after his discharge.
His first single as Gerry Dorsey , "Crazy Bells" was released in February 1959 on Decca . It is chiefly notable for being the first single written by Tony Hatch ( along with Paul Lacey ) . It sounds a lot like Frankie Vaughan , high octane pop with a manly voice backed by over-shrill female voices who keep a maddening "dingedy ding-a dong" refrain going throughout the song. Its high irritant quality wasn't enough to push it into the charts.
By November he had switched to Parlophone for "I'll Never Fall In Love Again" which you may recall was the last hit for its composer Johnny Ray. He's well supported by Tony Osborne and his Orchestra but his beefy vocal has none of the winning vulnerability of Ray's version and that won out.
Parlophone gave him another chance eighteen months later with a song called "Big Wheel" which was written by Les Vandyke and arranged by John Barry. I've only heard a brief snatch of it but it sounded again very much in the Frankie Vaughan mode.
"Gerry" was then laid low for three years by a bout of tuberculosis, returning to a music scene utterly transformed by those lads from Liverpool. Inevitably he resurfaced on Pye with "Take Your Time" in March 1964. It's the nearest he ever got to rock with a pounding beat and screechy brass but his mechanical vocal sounds like he wasn't very comfortable with the material.
His last release as Gerry Dorsey was "Baby Turn Around" in October 1965 on Hickory Records which is big and dramatic pop with some good sax and organ work. It's pretty close to Tom Jones territory which is perhaps not surprising as it was written by Jones's manager Gordon Mills.
Mills, who had known him for some years , now took charge of his career and came up with the still-baffling idea of re-naming him after a middle-ranking German composer. He got him another deal with Decca; the first single "Stay" in June 1966 had been rejected by them just weeks earlier on the grounds that "Gerry Dorsey" was "old hat" . "Stay" was self-penned but produced by Mills and again sounds tailor-made for Jones. It's passable but the song isn't really strong enough to bear the weight of the kitchen-sink production - Oriental intro, dramatic crashes, string flourishes etc.
The first fruits of success occurred in Belgium in the summer of 1966 when he took part in the Knokke song contest and his subsequent single "Dommage Dommage" topped the charts there. It's the first real outing for his trademark MOR balladeering and acceptable if you like that sort of thing.
Here's the Popular link for "Release Me" - quite lively as you'd expect Engelbert
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