London - British singer Boy George was Friday jailed for 15 months for handcuffing a Norwegian male escort to a wall and beating him with a metal chain in a "drug-crazed" incident in his London flat.

Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London found the 47-year-old former Culture Club singer, whose real name is George O'Dowd, guilty of false imprisonment and gratuitous violence.

The singer denied the charges and claimed that the victim, 29- year-old Audun Carlsen, had stolen photos from his laptop.

But he admitted handcuffing Carlsen to a wall in April 2007, saying he did so in order to trace the missing property.

The two men first came into contact through a gay social- networking site and met up for a pornographic photo shoot, the court heard.

The court was told that weeks later the singer invited the Norwegian back to his flat and it was then that he, with the help of a second man, chained Carlsen to his bed and beat him.

Boy George and Carlsen had been behaving like "drug-crazed idiots," the musician's defence lawyer, Adrian Waterman, told the court, pleading for a suspended sentence.

"He's on the way up," Waterman said about his client's battle with drug addiction. "The fact that he is, when sober, a kind and generous man means there is no shortage of people to help him through his recovery." (dpa)