I watched Ozzy Osbourne wee on the ALAMO! What happened next amazed me | Music | Entertainment

It was an image that stayed under wraps for nearly two decades. But Tom Sheehan’s shot became notorious nonetheless, depicting as it did the height of rock’n’roll excess… and the depths of debauchery: Ozzy Osbourne urinating on the Alamo. Sheehan, chief photographer of Melody Maker, had flown to San Antonio, Texas, with writer Allan “Jonesy” Jones in February 1982 to interview the hard-partying former Black Sabbath singer for the now-defunct weekly music paper when things took a turn for the weird. In full view of bus-loads of tourists, while drunk and wearing women’s clothes, Osbourne relieved himself on the former Spanish mission house – revered by Texans as the site of the famous siege during the state’s 1836 armed secession from Mexico.

“Ozzy had been drinking all night and had fallen into a canal near his hotel,” chuckles Sheehan, who has photographed everyone from Mick Jagger to Paul Weller, the Stone Roses to Kate Bush and Manic Street Preachers. “He sits down, orders a double brandy and puts it by our glasses in case [his manager and later wife] Sharon shows up. After a couple of hours of Jonesy doing the interview, I asked if we could do some pics. Ozzy goes to get changed and comes back in a pair of leggings, a jumper that looks like a wingsuit and a straw Stetson from the hotel gift shop.”

Having arrived at the Alamo, which Sheehan had planned as the backdrop for a shoot, the by-now-very-drunk rock star began muttering about needing the toilet, before, oblivious to passers-by, relieving himself against the wall by the entrance. “I got out the camera and took a few frames, we never used them,” continues Sheehan. “Then Ozzy climbs up into this alcove and I’m taking some more shots when, behind me, I hear this voice, ‘Yeah, that’s the guy I saw urinating on the Alamo.’ And this Ranger replies, ‘OK, we’ll take him in.’ Then, ‘And this gentleman here was photographing him.’ I just thought: ‘Oh f***.’ And the Ranger tells Ozzy to get down and he’s faffing about, five-foot in the air and scared of heights. The Ranger says, ‘You wouldn’t p*** on Buckingham Palace would you?’ and Ozzy replies, ‘I think I have done.’

“‘Hey boy, when you p*** on the Alamo, you p*** on the state of Texas.’ So I unrolled my film and palmed it off to Jonesy. And they were asking, ‘Are you the guy who bit the head off the bat?’ ‘Yeah,’ says Ozzy. ‘It was kind of crunchy!’ ‘Was Jonesy involved?’ ‘No,” he goes. “I’m a Swedish tourist’.”

To add to the chaos, Sharon arrived in time to see Ozzy being bundled into a squad car. The rockers was later released after she warned the authorities he had a gig that night for 20,000 people and a no-show might spark a riot. Slipping in and out of cod Brummie, American and Swedish accents with a touch of rhyming slang as he recalls the caper, Sheehan is a born raconteur.

Famous for not pandering to egos across more than four decades photographing the world’s biggest acts, Sheehan’s storytelling flair means the tales flow like the alcohol-free Guinness he’s drinking while recuperating from heart surgery. We’re talking today about his new collection of Oasis photographs, Roll With It, published in time for the Manchester band’s mega-reunion this summer. Sheehan travelled to New York with Oasis in July 1994, a month before the release of their debut album Definitely Maybe, and captured the Mancunians in a state of largely pre-fame innocence.

Later assignments charted recording sessions, tours and huge live shows, such as Knebworth. Many of the images, which capture the Gallagher brothers Noel and Liam and bandmates in all their arrogant, iconic glory, are published for the first time. Even pre-fame, Sheehan recalls their swagger being a “breath of fresh air”.

“It’s something they’ve carried through their career, which I’ve really enjoyed,” he says. “Some people call it arrogance, but to me it was self-belief in what they were doing. Their music, their stage presence, their public persona, all of that malarky Liam came out with – usually rooted in truth and pretty hilarious.”

That hasn’t stopped the famously blunt Sheehan, 75, from occasionally putting them straight on music, once telling bassist Andy Bell: “Get them off the f***ing Beatles. Let them know there’s more bands around than the Beatles.”

He continues: “They give music journalists a hard time, but photographers, they get on with – especially those who know what they’re talking about when it comes to music. But they were just nice people. It’s like all those rappers who are supposed to be villains.”

Meeting Liam on the plane to the US, Sheehan recalls: “As we were chatting, this lady came by with her kid and wanted to use the loo. You can’t really squeeze a kid into one of those tiny plane loos with you, so Liam offered to look after her little one for her. As he sat there on this fold-down seat, bouncing this little kid on his knee and talking to them, I thought, ‘Hold on, he’s supposed to be this mad rock ’n’ roller!’ He is to some extent, of course, but he’s also a thoroughly nice guy. We got on well straight away.”

He adds: “The band seemed to have a similar attitude to me: they welcome everybody but if you’re an arse, then the door’s over there, mate. Before Oasis had come grunge, and how many of the records of that era remain vital now? You could probably count them on the fingers of one hand. It was a different kind of music, and enjoyable – but rock ’n’ roll was invented for a reason. It shook things up.”

Images in the new collection include the group outside the iconic Dakota Building, naturally, plus a Who-inspired outdoor shot with the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes flags, and posing by Central Park’s Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon. Sheehan grew up in modest circumstances in Camberwell, south London, the youngest child of Irish immigrants – one reason perhaps for his take-no-prisoners approach.

When Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, now a firm friend, asked him what he thought of his band’s second album, he told the singer: “Try a bit harder, mate.” Today he explains with a smile: “About 99.999% of musicians are self-centred – incredibly self-centred. And that’s part of the job description. To be over-friendly with a band often doesn’t work because they’ll always let you down in the end.”

Do bands respect that? “I think so but I don’t get a lot of feedback because I don’t put out a questionnaire.” His father, also Tom, was a printers’ mechanic, his mother Kathleen a housewife, and with twins (Sheehan was youngest by half an hour) and two older girls, the family had little money but lots of love. “We didn’t have any electricity until about 1957 – until then we just had gas mantles and a coal fire. And this was Camberwell SE5, not the middle of Yorkshire moors. But it was great because you’d just run around like a tribe with your mates.

“By the time you get to your teenage years, the older kids in the flats or your sisters are listening to rock’n’roll. There was a step two fights down and my sisters used to take the wind-up gramophone down and they’d be playing 78s, everyone dancing. Then your mum would call, ‘Thomas, it’s time for bed.’”

The young Sheehan fell in love with rock photography at an early age – his dad lent him the money for a Praktica Nova 1B camera and he’d go to festivals like Hyde Park’s and take snaps. Having bagged a job as a photographic printer, he eventually wound up as in-house photographer for CBS Records in London’s Soho Square. Later, he worked freelance for the NME, Sounds, Record Mirror and Melody Maker, now all defunct bar NME which survives online – eventually sticking with the Maker, then published from leftover wartime Nissan huts near Waterloo Station. He rose to become its chief photographer.

“I’m Lucky Jim,” he says today of his long, storied career. “I’m blessed.”

Sheehan’s approach typically involved working fast, not discussing his ideas with his subjects and trying to understand their music and influences. “I always had to have a handle on their music, whether I liked it or not,” he explains.

“The ‘in’ for me was to try and understand where they’re coming from so I could talk to them, not about their stuff necessarily, but where their influences came from. And sometimes they didn’t know – so I’d have to lay on them stuff they’d never heard if they hadn’t got an elder brother or a young dad.”

He has been, as he puts it, “married and divorced to bands” a few times. “I had a sentence with them for a while, then their management wanted someone else to shoot them,” he explains. “But most bands welcomed me back.”

Sheehan’s favourite non-Oasis shots include sessions with US rapper Snoop Dogg and former Sex Pistol John Lydon. Of an iconic shot he captured of the latter in a few seconds through a hallway candelabra, he says: “John’s brilliant, a great musician and funny as f***, but you’ve got to leap through hoops of fire or walk the plank for him. You’ve got to go through all this bull**** to get the job done, but that’s the comedy.”

One memorable session with Snoop, awaiting trial on murder charges, involved four days waiting at the Hyatt House Hotel in LA – “I used to stay there so often I know the barmen” – for the Californian hip-hop star to find time. “We finally get round there and he’s living in this gated community which is all pastel pink, the polar opposite of his background in Long Beach. It looked like the end of a long party, it was carnage.”

Having suggested they shoot outdoors, Sheehan manoeuvred the rapper onto some steps. “He sits down and I move round the side and photograph him through the railings – like prison bars and I go click, click, click. I don’t like being deceitful but I thought, ‘You’ve kept me waiting for four days.’”

Asking the rapper to do a Black Power Salute, Sheehan passed him a pair of handcuffs he’d picked up at a London joke shop on the way to the airport.

The resulting image made the Melody Maker cover (Snoop was later acquitted of the murder charges).

“There it was. I came back with a picture I’m proud of,” he adds today. And Snoop loved it, too. So much so that next time, he agreed to pose laid out as if dead. But that’s another story… Sheehan’s glory!

• Oasis: Roll With It 1994–2002, by Tom Sheehan (Welbeck, £35) is out now