Amy Winehouse’s husband will serve at least 4½ months in jail after he was sentenced yesterday for trial-fixing and beating up a former pub landlord.

Blake Fielder-Civil, 26, was sentenced to 27 months after admitting grievous bodily harm and perverting the course of justice in a £200,000 trial-fixing plot aimed at saving him from jail. He has already served nine months on remand and so could be freed in December.

Amy Winehouse, who told fans at Glastonbury last month that her husband would be out of jail in two weeks, was not present in court.

Fielder-Civil and his friend, Michael Brown, beat James King, 36, so badly in June 2006 that he needed plates fitted into his face for a broken cheek-bone and still receives counselling.

Judge David Radford told Fielder-Civil at Snaresbrook Crown Court, East London, that he had behaved in a “cowardly and disgraceful” manner.

Fielder-Civil, who appeared relaxed throughout the hearing, showed little emotion as the sentence was passed. As he was taken down to the cells by court staff, he looked up and smiled at friends and family in the public gallery and mouthed: “See you soon.”

The judge said that Fielder-Civil was drunk and had taken cocaine when he and Brown attacked Mr King outside the Macbeth pub in Hoxton, East London. He had joined in the attack “out of a mistaken sense of loyalty” to his friend.

“The fact remains that in joining in that attack by kicking Mr King after he had already been punched and kicked by Mr Brown, you behaved in a gratuitous, cowardly and disgraceful way,” Judge Radford said. “It will be of little comfort to Mr King that you did so because of your inebriation.”

The attack on Mr King was “vicious and one-sided”, the judge said. He rejected a submission from Fielder-Civil that he should be sent for treatment at a private drug rehabilitation centre.

Brown, 40, of Carshalton, South London, was sentenced to a total of 33 months for his role in the attack. Anthony Kelly, 25, of Chalk Farm, North London, was given a custodial sentence totalling 20 months for perverting the course of justice. James Kennedy, 20, of Hatfield, Hertford-shire, was given a 40-week sentence at a young offender institution, suspended for 12 months, for the same charge.

Kate Anderson, Fielder-Civil’s solicitor, said her client had made “extreme efforts” to act as an exemplary citizen while in custody and was disappointed by the length of the sentence.

“We are giving serious consideration to appealing,” she said.

Jeremy Dein, QC, for Fielder-Civil, told the court that he “was of exemplary good character”, despite his previous “intimate relationship with drug addiction” to heroin and cocaine.

Mr Dein was interrupted by Judge Radford as he described Fielder-Civil’s ordeal as a “nightmare scenario, not just for him but for his wife and his family”. The judge questioned whether Fielder-Civil was of exemplary good character “if what I read about him and the use of drugs is true”.

Mr Dein said that the attack was the result of a “drugs-ridden lack of judgment rather than callousness”. He said that Fielder-Civil had signed up for drug rehabilitation upon his release. “For almost half his life he has been in the clutches of drugs,” he said. “It’s [Fielder-Civil and Winehouse’s] ambition to divorce themselves from hard drugs, not to separate themselves from each other.”

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