Ashley Roberts announces solo album

Former Pussycat Doll Ashley Roberts is to release her debut solo album next year.

The blonde singer – who quit the group along with Kimberly Wyatt, Jessica Sutta and Melody Thornton last year over reported rivalries with lead singer Nicole Scherzinger – revealed she can’t wait to show her fans what she has to offer.

She told Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper: "Even though I was part of a singing and dancing group, people never really did get to hear me just sing and do my thing.

"I definitely want to make sure I take Pussycat Dolls fans along with me, but at the same time make music that is me and my sound as a solo artist. It's up-tempo, stuff that people just want to dance and shake their booty to, but then I want to have some mid-tempo ballads in there."

Ashley’s former bandmates have also begun to forge their own careers, with Kimberly appearing on UK talent show ‘Got To Dance’ and Jessica and Melody working on new albums.

Nicole - who has been working as a stand-in judge for Simon Cowell’s pop star search show ‘The X Factor’ – recently admitted the band’s split was always “inevitable”, as the other girls were only ever hired as backing dancers.

She explained: “Nothing went wrong. It was just inevitable. You put five girls together to make one of the biggest groups in the world and things are going to clash. It was always going to happen. The group was always a dance group, a burlesque dance group. They cast me to be the singer of the group.”