'Call me Enge (rhymes with Penge) '

He is the king of romance. The last of the crooners. The man with the most preposterous name in pop. But now Engelbert Humperdinck is more interested in his healing hands than hit records (his £72 million in the bank doesn't hurt)

Engelbert Humperdinck, wearing a black leather jacket over a T-shirt announcing, 'I Am The Big Dog', is showing me around his Leicestershire acres. 'That's the rose garden - Diana's rose garden. My wife named it in her honour, after she died. This is the Japanese corner, where Pat likes to sit and be quiet. And this is the Chinese corner. This is the chipping green - it used to be an orchard, but we took that out. And the tennis court, which used to be a vegetable garden. And this - you must see this - this is my wife's compost heap. Look how neat it is! That's her way.'

Patricia, his wife of 37 years, mows the grass herself on a mini-tractor, removing beforehand the iron silhouettes of a dozen or so capering fairies that are stuck into the lawn outside the kitchen window. She will tolerate assistance, if doing some particularly heavy work, or if she's putting in a feature, but mostly she likes to do the gardening herself. Similarly, she doesn't like the idea of domestic staff, although theirs is a big old pile - built in 1856 for the Duchess of Hamilton - and Business Age last year estimated that her balladeer husband was worth £100m. This amount is disputed by his publicist, who nudges me instead towards another report that mentioned £72m.

Still, £72m is most certainly not to be sniffed at. It's a figure that might come as some surprise to those who associate Engelbert with little more than sideburns and cheesy, mockable pop ('Release Me', which held 'Penny Lane' off the top spot in 1967, was later used with heavy irony as the theme tune for The Fast Show). And it's true that, in general, his preposterous name is more immediately recognisable than any of his old hits. More recently, where his old rival Tom Jones has famously reinvented himself with the help of Robbie Williams and Catatonia, Engelbert has failed to make much purchase on either the contemporary pop scene or the easy-listening revival, although, in his defence, his rendition of 'Fly High, Lesbian Seagull' for the soundtrack of Beavis and Butthead Do America went platinum, and his 1999 album The Dance Album was called 'brilliantly cool' by Billboard. For the most part, the people who continue to buy his records and flock to see him at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas are the same people, or more accurately the same ladies, who bought 'The Last Waltz' and 'Spanish Eyes' and 'Quando Quando Quando' - songs which were invariably written by others - way back when.

We move on, past wishing wells, an antique red phone box, a conference of gnomes in the shrubbery. Engelbert, the height and colour of a Victorian tallboy, is still musing in leisurely mid-Atlantic over his wife's curious behaviour. 'She doesn't want anybody in the house. She's an amazing woman. She runs the whole damn thing.' Onwards, past the plashy fountain, the postbox, the statue of Pan, the swimming pool with a crest - Engelbert's family crest, he tells me - marked out in tiles on the bottom. 'Un Dieu, Un Roi,' he recites for my benefit, though he's not 100 per cent sure what that means.

And then, of course, there's the pub, a pork scratching's throw from the house. The Duchess of Hamilton is Engelbert's own petite ferme , built out of respect for the drink-driving laws, and magicked out of what was once the scullery. Outside, there's a swinging sign and masses of geraniums; inside, there's a log-effect electric fire, a dartboard, red velvet banquettes and some vivid carpet- ing. Engelbert, who gamely steps behind the bar for the photographer's amusement, doesn't keep it stocked with booze any more: it's only open at Christmas, and so smells more of mustiness than cigars and beer.

For tax purposes, he cannot stay in the UK for more than 90 days a year. At other times, he's based in Los Angeles, at the Pink Palace, the house once owned by Jayne Mansfield, with the pink heart-shaped pool. But his own heart is firmly located in Leicestershire, where he grew up, and where many of his nine brothers and sisters remain. The Pink Palace is currently for sale, as it has been for a couple of years; he wants something requiring less maintenance. 'It won't be a monstrous house like the Pink Palace, fully staffed and everything - that's a pain. It will be something more moderate that I can just turn the key and walk away from. I would rather live here, in England, if you want to know the truth. There will be a time when that happens. I'll say to hell with it, and I'll come back.'

It's appropriate that, for those precious 90 days, Engelbert can take refuge here, and survey his very own shrink-to-fit England behind the electric gate and perimeter fencing. Pub, postbox, phone box, all the constituents of a sentimental expat's fantasies. Isn't that right, Enge? (He's asked me to call him Enge, to rhyme with Penge. One of his grandsons has just been named Enge-Leon.) Well, he says, it's almost perfect, although he's just thought of a vital missing element. 'The one thing I want to put in my garden is a flagpole and a Union Jack. It's something I thought about yesterday, with all this happening in the world. You have to advertise the fact that you are patriotic, you know. So that's my next project.'

We've come to the end of the garden tour by this stage, and have entered the main house, which is full of whimsical china boot knick-knacks. Radio 2 is playing in the brown and green country-style kitchen, and in the distance a tumble dryer is making comforting noises. There are Rentokil cards pinned to the noticeboard, along with Enge's tour dates. Patricia, slim, dark, with a no-nonsense look about her, has excused herself into the shower. Enge tops up his wine glass (hey, it's midday) and introduces me to Katy, his terrier: 'She's a healer, you know.' He tells me that Katy is able to tell when people are suffering, or in some sort of pain, and communicates her diagnosis by licking their legs. This is disconcerting news, because she's already given mine a thorough rinse.

The interview is to be conducted in the study, which is rather Barbie Baronial, what with all the velvet and panelling and the long lines of wall-hung photographs, several slightly askew, of my host with Mohammed Ali, Ringo Starr, Raquel Welch and Cary Grant. Enge flicks on another flame-effect fire, while I inspect his Big Red Book, placed prominently on a lectern in the middle of the room; rather surprisingly, it contains no closely typed biographical detail, just snapshots of Enge being hugged by people with big lapels on the This Is Your Life set. However, I'm unable to look at more than a few pages, because now Enge is offering to divine the sex of my baby, which is due in two months' time, and though I didn't want a hospital technician to tell me what I'm having, I rather like the idea of an ageing sex god having a crack. It's a simple procedure involving my front-door keys, a length of thread and a moment of total silence.

'I'm always right,' he assures me, after delivering his verdict. (He says it's a girl. I'll let you know, Enge.) Indeed, I've read that Enge, like Katy, has Powers: a few years ago, a holistic practitioner who had cured him of a viral infection said that Enge was a healer, too. 'Will you tell me a little bit about the healing?' I ask.

'I don't talk about it,' says Enge, a little airily, but in the end he can't help himself. He'd consulted a Hamburg iridologist ('lives like a hermit, has one leg, a very clean- looking character, beautiful grey hair') about a stubborn viral infection a few years back, and, after some holistic treatment, the problem vanished within a fortnight. 'The German said, "I have two healers, and you are better than both of them. You have an aura around you that is so big, you have the power to help people."' So Enge took this on board and practised on his family, and the first time he did it for real, he prayed and felt a tingling in his hand, and his subject's migraine vanished in three minutes. Nowadays, he does a spot of mass healing during the third song in every performance, though the audience is unaware that this is going on. 'I think it. I don't tell them I'm doing it. "Anybody sick in the audience, please, God, help them." And the medication comes from above.' He is merely, he says modestly, a conduit.

Enge was raised a Catholic, and says his faith has always been important to him. While touring, he sets up a little altar, 'just a little thing for carrying my holiness around', in his dressing room. However, there is a limit. When I suggest that perhaps he should build a little chapel in his garden, just to give it the finishing touch, he winces. 'Please don't tell Pat that, she'll build it.'

Of course, in his younger days, Enge was not exactly a poster boy for Rome - Patricia once remarked that you could paper a room with all the paternity suits with which he'd been issued, and indeed, in the 70s and 80s, two women (a showgirl from California and, deliciously, a Sunday-school teacher from New York) extracted maintenance payments from him for their daughters. I wonder whether the clash between his faith and the trials of the flesh - very Thornbirds - caused him any moral anguish.

'No,' says Enge peaceably, steepling his hands over his torso, 'but I kept the confession box very busy. Naughtiness is a part of growing up. It starts when you're a toddler and never ends. You're just trying life out, you know: am I missing anything? Those are some of the errors that you make. I'm not that naughty any more, anyway.'

Just how old is Mr Humperdinck? This is one of the great mysteries of the universe. I'm not sure, but then neither is anyone else. When asked, he replies, quite unruffled, 'I'm not going to tell you.'

You're 66, aren't you?

Enge shakes his head reproachfully. 'Younger, thank God.'

OK, what about 63?

'You can call me that.' (In fact, using various dates that he has given me, I later work out that he must be 64.) When people ask him why he looks so young, he tells them that it all boils down to flying around the world in an anticlockwise direction for the last three decades. 'No, it's an amazing thing: Mum and Dad, they never had a wrinkle on their faces.' He holds out his smooth brown hands for inspection. 'I mean, look: these don't look like the hands of a man in his sixties.'

Though he recently had an eye operation, which liberated him from his trifocals (he didn't wear them on stage for obvious reasons and now says, 'I'm back in touch with the audience. Not that I wasn't before, but now I can see them'), Enge says he has no interest, at the moment, in cosmetic surgery. He's not keen on scalpels and, in any case, he doesn't think he needs any help yet. Indeed, his face, though no longer quite as bony as it once was, still has a rather hawkish, contoured, Red Indian exoticism to it.

I'm inclined to believe him when he says he's still a plastic-surgery virgin. After all, he merrily volunteers the fact that he has been colouring his hair - it's no more hassle than washing one's face - since going prematurely grey at 20. 'I've been grey for a long time, you know, and I don't mind telling people that.' It seems a bit strange to me, to bother to dye one's hair and then tell everyone you're doing it. What's the point? Enge thinks. 'Well, because it gives me a feeling of... of being what I was, how I was, you know, at the beginning.'

Thus far, few adjustments have had to be made to his show, which is still wheeled out about 140 times a year: 'I get a thrill out of being on that stage - my platform, my perch, my pedestal. Sure, you can't do the things you did when you were 20, but I'm still very active on stage.' This he attributes to being very sporty as a youngster and then, in his middle years, taking up martial arts. I ask if he's still practising now. 'No. Now I just punch the bag, and she hates it. No, I'm joking.' He has a gym in the garage, plays a lot of golf (he shares a locker with Joe Pesci at the Bel Air Country Club) and is nuts about waterskiing.

Enge is big on jokes, and there's something about his deadpan delivery that will make you laugh, however awful the punchline. He has a long list of variety-hall one-liners, most of which have been separated at birth from a triumphant ta-da on the cymbal. 'I'm very superstitious. Never throw a hat on the bed, unless it's followed by pantyhose and a bra,' he says, and, 'So I said to my agent, "What am I going to do with all these begging letters?" and he says, "Keep sending them."

'I have a sense of humour, as you know,' he informs me. 'I have a very good sense of humour. I love telling jokes, especially on the golf course.' I ask for his best one, but, gallantly, he won't tell me. 'I can't tell you my best joke, it's too rude. I do like rude jokes. They're men jokes.'

Arnold Dorsey, the ninth of 10 children, was born in Madras, where his father was an army engineer. When he was 11, the family returned to Leicester, where Arnold, a plump child with sticky-out teeth, took up a paper round to pay for his saxophone lessons. He left school at 15, worked for a while in a local engineering factory, did National Service in Germany, and then, after being demobilised, started to sing in working men's clubs.

'I was a loner, and I was a tremendous dreamer. I really wanted to be something, somebody, not because I came from a large family, just because I wanted to make it. It all came to pass. My dreams became the blueprints of reality.' It took a bit of time and effort, though. First he had to lose the weight and the protruding teeth (according to legend, he slept face-down until they straightened out). Then he changed his name, to Gerry Dorsey. He was earning a living, but not much more, and, by this stage, he wanted to get married. He'd spotted Patricia at a dance hall in Leicester ('this young lady, all tanned, with short bubbly hair') but they waited seven years before heading up the aisle. 'I couldn't afford it. I felt, if I couldn't afford to keep her, I didn't want to marry her. And I'm still trying.' Their first marital home, where the first of their four children was born, was in Hammersmith, above a shop: 'No carpets, no curtains, a bare light bulb. We had porridge in the morning and mincemeat at night with mashed potatoes.'

After a few years of porridge and mince, his manager, who also handled Tom Jones, said it was time for drastic measures. Goodbye Gerry Dorsey, hello Engelbert Humperdinck. ('Does Arnold seem like someone you barely knew?' I ask, because even Patricia now calls him Enge. 'No, I have pleasant memories of Arnold. Arnold couldn't have been my stage name then. Although it didn't do too bad for Schwarzenegger.') The sideburns appeared at this point, too.

Who knows if it was the sideburns or the name borrowed from the composer of Hansel and Gretel , but Enge finally arrived in 1967, when Dickie Valentine succumbed to a sudden illness and forfeited his slot on Sunday Night at the London Palladium . Afterwards, Frankie Vaughan called Enge to congratulate him on his performance; Gracie Fields told him that he was ' sympathique '. Even better, 'Release Me', which had been hanging around the edge of the charts for three months, was suddenly selling 80,000 copies a day. Girls started to scream when he appeared on stage. His management began to pretend that poor Pat was his sister. And then it just happened. Enge was, quite suddenly, the King of Romance.

Well, I say, there must be worse names.

'Yeah,' agrees Enge, mildly. 'Hump the Chump.'

It's nice and warm in Enge's study, basking in the soporific orange glow of the electric fire. The King of Romance is on his third glass of wine. He tells me that he's always tanned because he spends so much time outside in LA, playing golf. That reminds him of something else. 'Now I can tell you a story,' he says with satisfaction. 'This guy had a tan, and the only place that was not tanned was that little white piece in the middle. But he wanted his entire body tanned. So he went down to the beach and he covered his arms, his nose, his face up with sand, and the only place that was exposed was that little piece in the middle over here. Along came an old lady with a stick, and she sees this thing in the ground, and she starts tapping it - standing there looking at it, tapping it and standing there looking at it - and then she beat it to death. And she says, "Fifty years ago I was looking for them, now they're growing wild!" He winks at me. 'That's one of my cleaner jokes,' he says. I can't help feeling rather pleased that he rustled it up, just for me.