‘High as a kite’ Elton and Lennon hid from ‘weird’ Warhol
David Pilditch
JAMAICA’S inspirational bobsleigh team are back – and their secret weapon is a broadband engineer from Peterborough.
Shanwayne Stephens and teammate Nimroy Turgott are setting their sights on the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing having been inspired by blockbuster film Cool Runnings.
The smash hit 1993 movie followed the legendary exploits of the Jamaican men’s bobsleigh team at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
Shanwayne and Nimroy, who are based in the Cambridgeshire city, have been unable to train during the coronavirus lockdown.
Instead, they have been streaming track videos, sitting on the floor and visualising themselves barrelling down the icy bends.
They then send videos and aerial drone footage of their workouts to
SIR Elton John and John Lennon were so high during a cocaine binge they refused to let Andy Warhol into their party because they feared he would leak photographs of them.
The Rocket Man legend recalled a time when he and the late Beatles’ star were “coked out of their heads” in a New York hotel in 1974.
When American pop artist Warhol came knocking at their door, the pair refused him entry – fearing he would take their picture.
Sir Elton, who has been sober since 1990, said: “[Warhol] knocked on the door about two their coach. But disaster struck after Shanwayne, who serves in the RAF, accidentally severed his broadband cable while gardening.
Virgin Media engineer Paul Roach was stunned when he went to a routine call to repair the cable and the team-mates revealed they were part of the new Jamaican bobsleigh team.
The pair even donned their competition kit and helmets to prove they were not imposters.
Paul is now helping the team go
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o’clock in the morning and we were so paranoid about who it was and it took me about 10 minutes to walk over to the peep-hole.
“I turned around to John Lennon and I mouthed ‘Andy Warhol’ and he said ‘Don’t let him in, he’s got a camera’.
“Andy always camera everywhere so the took
alast thing I wanted was a photograph of me high as a kite, so we ignored him.” Speaking to the Talk Art podcast, Sir Elton, now 73, said: “I met Andy two or three times but I didn’t know him. “I love his work obviously, and I’ve got a lot of his Polaroids and stitched photographs. “But I thought he was a little weird so I didn’t really want to hang out with him.” Sir Elton also revealed he prefers vinyl to CD because it sounds better.
He said: “If you play a pressing of Aretha Franklin’s Greatest Hits on record and then you listen to it on CD, it’s a different ball-game.
“Any album – a Beatles album, my album – if it’s a good pressing it’ll beat a digital any day of the week.
“Digital is a great medium of listening to things but it makes you lazy because when you record an album on analogue the editing takes quite some time – but the sound is warmer. But I’m a technophobe.”