Aston Merrygold on solo music: 'The first songs I wrote sounded too much like JLS'

Singer Aston Merrygold recently launched a solo career and revealed that it was tough to get his own material to a place where it sounded uniquely his and not like an offshoot of his former band, JLS.

Speaking to HMV this week, the heartthrob admitted that he wrote around 300 songs for his debut solo album: "I reckon it was close to 300 by the end. A lot of songs, a lot of genres, a lot of different ideas, some were the same song, just with different bits. Some were great and some are definitely never going to see the light of day."

Referring to finding his own sound, the singer admitted that the first collection of tracks he penned "were very JLS and I had to move away from that" although he eventually settled on a style:

"There was a lot of experimenting and a lot of trying different sounds and seeing what worked. I’d try lots of things and see what the right fit was for me. I went back to what I was listening to growing up, it’s so much harder to stand out now, because the standard of songwriting so high, you can’t fake it."

Watch Merrygold performing his new single, 'Get Stupid', live here: