Girls Aloud star Cheryl Cole has admitted that while she's enjoying being a solo artist it wasn't initially her own idea to record music independently of her band mates.

Speaking to Pop Justice, the 'Call My Name' songstress explained that Black Eyed Peas hitmaker Will.i.Am suggested the move and managed to talk her into it:

"It was actually him that convinced me to do a solo record. I never would have done a solo record without him."

"At the time, I would have had a family. At the time I was still married! But it was actually Will saying to us, 'You know you're going to do a solo record, right?', and I was saying, 'I don't want to, not yet'."

"And he was like, 'I think you should. You need to'. He said, 'I'm excited, I want to be involved with it'. So he was involved from day one. I recorded my first ever solo song ['Heartbreaker'] with Will."

Cole performed at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert outside of Buckingham Palace on Monday night (June 4) and her rendition of Lady Antebellum's 'Need You Now' drew mixed reactions from Twitter users.

Watch her Diamond Jubilee Concert performance in full here: