Boy George, seen here arriving at Snaresbrook Crown Court in London on Friday, has been sentenced to 15 months in jail for falsely imprisoning a male escort. (Matt Dunham/Associated Press.)

British singer Boy George, convicted last month of falsely imprisoning a male escort and beating him with a metal chain, has been sentenced to 15 months in jail.

In sentencing the 47-year-old Culture Club frontman in London on Friday, Judge David Radford told him he was guilty of "gratuitous violence," The Guardian newspaper reported.

The singer, who was tried under his real name, George O'Dowd, admitted at his trial to handcuffing Audun Carlsen, a 29-year-old Norwegian model, to a wall fixture in O'Dowd's London apartment in April 2007. He said he had restrained Carlsen because he had stolen photos from his laptop on a previous visit and he was trying to trace his missing property.

Carlsen managed to escape by wrenching the fixture free. He left the apartment, wearing only his underclothes, and alerted the police.

The jury was shown photos of welts on Carlsen's head and injuries to his arm, which he said were inflicted by O'Dowd. But O'Dowd said he couldn't account for these injuries.

"While I accept that Mr. Carlsen's physical injuries were not serious or permanent," Radford told O'Dowd on Friday, "there can be no doubt that your premeditated, callous and humiliating … detention … shocked, degraded and traumatised [him]."

At the December trial, the court was told that the two men came in contact through a gay social networking website.

Carlsen said O'Dowd made up the story that he had tampered with the computer to punish him for not having sex during their first meeting at O'Dowd's apartment.

He said they parted on good terms from that visit and the singer paid him most of the fee they had agreed upon.

In subsequent weeks, they exchanged emails and agreed to a second meeting. At this meeting, O'Dowd invited Carlsen into his bedroom for a naked photo session, during which Carlsen said O'Dowd assaulted him with the help of an unnamed man.

O'Dowd, whose pop hits in the 1980s including Do You Really Want to Hurt Me and Karma Chameleon sold more than 50 million records, is now a disc jockey.

He did community service in 2006 with New York City's Department of Sanitation after he called police with a false report of a burglary at his lower Manhattan apartment and officers found cocaine there.

With files from the Associated Press