The Gosford Park star has been dabbling with music in recent years, releasing an collection of songs in 2013, and he is set to unveil his first full album, Holding Patterns, next year (16).

Laurence has now revealed he recruited his actor dad James to help him whittle down a long list of tracks for the record.

"I send all the songs to my dad," he tells the London Evening Standard. "You're choosing from about 30 songs and I did send him a long playlist and said, 'Can you listen to this and tell me which ones are good?'"

The actor reveals he also tests out new material on his two sons, Winston, seven, and Eugene, three, with wife Billie Piper.

"My kids are a great judge of which songs are good," he adds ."If you play a song in front of a toddler you can tell if it's a good one pretty quickly. You can tell if they like it or not because they either start wobbling or they don't."

However, it still took him a year to put together the record, and he insists making music is tougher than acting: "It's much harder work than I thought it would be. I did a lot of the pre-production myself at home because I have a little set up so I made it sound roughly ball park area.

"It's the hardest work I've ever done in my life putting it all together, but it was joyously fun. It was a mission that took the best part of a year. I thought it would take about two months maximum."