English singer Boy George says he played hard-man to deal with other prisoners during his recent jail sentence. The 48-year-old singer served four months for shackling a Norwegian male escort to the wall and whipping him while high on cocaine in his East London flat.

“The situation required me to be a bit feisty, a bit don’t-mess-with-me,” he told a magazine. George added he had committed the crime under the influence of cocaine, but insisted he was now clean.

He committed the offence in 2008 and was sentenced to 15 months but he was inside only for four months due to good behaviour in prison. He served the sentence in the category C Edmunds Hill Prison in Suffolk, and when he was released in May this year he wore an ankle monitor for a further three months.

The former Culture Club frontman said: “I had it coming, it wasn’t that big a surprise.” He claimed the four months he served of his 15 months sentence had made him a happier person. “It was four months to be with myself,” he told Jonathan Ross’s BBC1 chat show.

The star, who was released in May, said: “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

The Daily Star quoted him as telling The Times: “When I was away (in prison), I wrote a lot of stuff, which will be released next year. I wrote a diary and songs. I got into trouble because I wrote on the wall: ‘Some things are past understanding, you just need a place to land.’

“It was part of a lyric. I actually wrote a song about Amy when I was in prison.”

While he was banged up in prison he wrote a song for Amy Winehouse called Your Pain Makes A Beautiful Sound, it features the lyrics: ‘You’re a genius, you’re a car crash / It’s hard to say what you do best.’

Boy George revealed that the two singers share a taste in music. Their favourite song was “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”, written in the early 1960s by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Down the years, that song, with its pay-off line “He hit me, and it was good”, has been something of an anthem for domestic abusers, but it may have a rival when Boy George’s song for Amy is released.

The singer was addicted to heroin and cocaine by the time Culture Club – the band that made him a household name -broke up in 1986. He beat the heroin addiction but from 2003 to 2008 he used cocaine continually.