Boy George reveals his prison ballads about pain — and Amy Winehouse

Boy George wrote a song about Amy Winehouse while he was in prison for shackling a Norwegian man to the wall in his London flat, he tells The Times today.

It is the first time that he has spoken publicly about his prison experiences.Titled Your Pain Makes a Beautiful Sound, the song includes the lines: “You’re a genius, you’re a car crash/ It’s hard to say what you do best.”

It is not surprising that the singer, whose real name is George O’Dowd, should empathise with his fellow performer. They both have fabulous, soulful voices well suited to songs about emotional turmoil, but they have also both been involved in ugly incidents linked to problems with hard drugs.

Winehouse, whose second album, Back to Black (2006), became a worldwide bestseller on the back of the single Rehab, was the first British singer awarded five Grammy awards on one night. But drugs and alcohol derailed her career. She made a tentative televised comeback last weekend, singing backing vocals to her 13-year-old goddaughter, Dionne Bromfield, on Strictly Come Dancing.

Boy George 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, he says in the interview with Alan Franks. In 2008 he and another man manacled Audun Carlsen, 29, a male escort, for several hours and beat him.

George served four months of a 15-month sentence, until May this year, in the category C Edmunds Hill Prison in Suffolk, and then wore an ankle monitor for a further three.

Apart from the first six days, which he spent at Pentonville, he says that the experience was largely a positive one. “I wrote a lot of stuff, which will be released next year. I wrote a diary, and songs.”

The two have met once, at a gig at the Coco Club in London. Winehouse, whom he admires greatly, went backstage. They discovered that they share a favourite song, the appropriately controversial Gerry Goffin/Carole King song He Hit Me, recorded in 1962 by the Crystals and produced by Phil Spector. It contains the words: “He hit me and it felt like a kiss. He hit me and I knew he loved me.”

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