Early years

He was born as one of ten children of British Army officer Mervyn Dorsey and his wife Olive of Anglo-Indian origin[citation needed]. Arnold George Dorsey's family migrated to Leicester, England when he was ten, 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 he's believed not to have tried singing until he was seventeen 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, when Decca Records gave him a chance. His first single, I'll Never Fall in Love Again, was anything but a hit, but Dorsey and the label would reunite 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 but returned to club work with little success, until, in 1966, he teamed with an old roommate named Gordon Mills who had become a music impresario and the manager of Tom Jones.