I guess I was lucky.”Five years on the dole is far from being a record. Mark Ashton, lead singer of the band Addict, which signed to the record company V2 last year for pounds 100,000, was on the dole for eight years. Chumbawumba – John Prescott’s least favourite band and now also Brit Award winners – also wrote songs while on the dole. “He was able to concentrate on writing the songs.”Portishead, the former Brit Award winners, actually met up on a back- to-work scheme. And two of them, “The Drugs Don’t Work” and “Bitter Sweet Symphony” were huge hits as singles. “Richard needed that exodus period,” a spokesman for the band said yesterday. But his songs, which appeared on Oasis’s first album Definitely Maybe were worked on and rehearsed while the rest of the band were on the dole.The Verve’s songwriter and frontman Richard Ashcroft spent two years, 1995 and 1996, drifting and writing songs.

Those songs were later to appear on their Brit Award-winning album Urban Hymns. Jarvis Cocker, lead singer and songwriter with Pulp, only signed off in 1993, even though he had been gigging and recording for some years.
Liam Gallagher of Oasis was on social security for years before hitting the big time, as were other members of the band. Liam went to a Restart interview and told the DSS official he wanted to be a rock star. When the official told him that was not possible, he said he would settle for a lumber jack instead, before terminating the conversation His songwriter brother Noel was in work. “So why involve the House of Commons in an act that would run contrary to what the Security Council would do?”It was now inevitable that there would be another war in the Gulf, he added. “That huge fleet is not in the Gulf waiting to be withdrawn when Saddam gives a friendly noise to Kofi Annan [the UN Secretary-General] …. “Backing the Government in a rare Commons intervention, John Major, who was Prime Minister at the time of the Gulf War, asked: “What would this House say to itself and say to history if we knew that now we had an opportunity to take action and we chose not to? I don’t suggest this is an easy option.

The Government have no easy option here, and they deserve our support for the decisions they have to take.”Question of War, page 12. An increase in women’s drinking may account for the rapid rise in breast cancer which has claimed 300,000 lives in the last 20 years, researchers said yesterday. A review of six studies shows that women who have between two and a half and six alcoholic drinks a day increase their risk of breast cancer by over 40 per cent. A drink is counted as half a pint of beer, a glass of wine or a tot of spirits.