Former Stone Roses frontman IAN BROWN still shudders to think of his time in an English prison, because the violent behaviour among inmates and officers alike left him traumatised.

Brown, who was jailed for four months after an air-rage incident in 1998, is famed for his tough-guy image, but nothing prepared him for the carnage within the walls of Strangeways Prison in Manchester.

He recalls, "I saw a kid hit another kid in the ear with two pool balls in a sock, and his ear came up the size of a dinner plate.

"Through a crack in my cell door, I saw prison officers running down the wings with proper baseball bats to fill someone in.

"I saw a kid who'd beat an old lady up and her picture had been in the Evening News, and the screw put it on the table and pointed at him.

"They had him on the floor bouncing the door on his head, and he was just limp, and they dragged him off to the medical wing.

"It was genuinely sickening some of the violence I saw."