An evening with Engelbert

The 69-year-old crooner is still 'with it' "" and rock 'n roll snobs can take a hike.

The first time I heard Engelbert Humperdinck's voice was on his version of "Raindrops keep falling on my head" on a 16 Super Oldies cassette.

It was one of my favourite songs at the time "" soulful and stately, unlike the original, more playful version by B J Thomas, which accompanied the slapsticky bicycle scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Engelbert's singing was deep and melodic and sent a thrill down my 11-year-old spine when he sang the words "So I just did me some talkin' to the sun/And I said I didn't like the way he got things done/Sleeping on the job/Wo-o-o...". You get the idea "" I hope.

Later I heard some of his other songs, or song covers "" in particular "A man and a woman" (evocative of the ethereal French film of the same title), "From here to eternity" and "Quando Quando Quando".

It didn't much matter what others said about him "" that he was just a pretty voice without much range, part of a generation of assembly-line crooners who didn't write their own songs, that what he did wasn't Art.

Yarbles, I said, great bolshy yarblockos to the snobbery of the rock-n-roll brigade, I loved the songs and the way he sang them.

Naturally, the concert last Sunday was a must-attend. My mother, who wrote fan letters to Engelbert and Pat Boone and other golden boys back in the 1960s, was understandably excited.

I was slightly less so "" only because it was at the Siri Fort Auditorium, where things often tend to go wrong. Buying tickets for Rs 1,500 and enjoying the same view as those who paid half as much.

Waiting in the auditorium for over an hour and a half before anything begins. Hearing some of the stupidest words ever to issue from human lips, during speeches at film festival inaugurations.

Given these precedents, we are all very glad that when the concert does finally get underway it just begins, minus long preludes. Engelbert's 13-member band tunes up slowly, and then the man himself saunters on stage and begins singing; the waiting and grumbling are quickly forgotten.

He starts with one of his biggest hits, "A Man Without Love", pausing so the audience can complete the refrain for him, but there's hardly a hint of participation at this point.

It takes some time for the audience to warm up but by the fifth or sixth song everyone is in the right mood, and the balding gent seated in front of us even commences a series of "woo! woo!"s that somehow manage to be endearing rather than annoying.

As concerts by international artistes go this is relatively modest in scale, but then that's what we were expecting.

Most of the audience is aged between 40 and 55, there are no spectacular light-and-sound displays, just a 69-year-old man singing one love song after another with a lot of panache.

You don't pore over the lyrics of the kinds of songs Engelbert sings, which means that apart from the older tracks (because we were all familiar with those anyway) there is a certain sameness to the numbers; one song segues into the next and what really holds it all together is the golden voice and the occasional showing off by individual band members.

There are some nice stand-up comedy interludes too: Engelbert (who by the way has a wonderfully resonant speaking voice too, which isn't a given when you're a good singer) does some mimickry, takes part in a cheerfully risque act with a thong that is brought onstage for him to autograph; makes digs at Tom Jones, does an Elvis-style bump-and-grind routine.

He's sprightly for his age but you can expect that once you know he does up to 140 concerts per year. There are signs of tiring late in the proceedings; he pauses more between sentences while talking, sings a couple of numbers sitting down ("because I'm almost 33, you know!").

Fortunately he finds the energy to end the show in style, with a medley of songs including "Quando Quando Quando" and the classic "Release me", and finally a rousing version of "My way".

My one regret: Engelbert didn't sing "A man and a woman". (I didn't expect, or want, him to perform the intimate "Raindrops..." in this setting.)

But that apart, it was a night well spent. We leave among a sea of elderly ladies with very goofy expressions on their faces. "Now they'll all have to go back home to their cranky husbands," my mother giggles to her childhood friend.

And boast that a nearly 70-year-old singer with black-dyed sideburns down to his neck had released them from reality for an evening.