I have no great expertise in the blues. In fact my last brush with them was on the gently didactic CBeebies show ZingZillas, on which they were played and sung by a monkey puppet. This, I imagine, puts me squarely in the intended audience for Hugh Laurie's hit blues album, Let Them Talk. Laurie has been doing the chat show rounds for this record, his combination of obvious smarts and gosh-wow modesty as charming as ever, and he's clearly delighted to be fronting a crack blues band on live TV.
Let Them Talk is, of course, a vanity project. There are a lot of negative associations around such projects, and when one hoves into view it triggers predictable responses. Nobody would be buying this, you hear repeatedly, if it wasn't by Laurie. But everyone including those buying the record surely already knows this, and they don't care: curiosity is hardly a bad reason to hear an album. And besides, Laurie's theatrical readings and oddly accented drawl are the most individual and interesting things about a gorgeous-sounding but reverential record.
