Levi Roots
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2016
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the entrepreneur, Levi Roots.
His business success began following an appearance on BBC Two's Dragon's Den in 2007. With guitar in hand, he sang about his 'Reggae reggae sauce' which he had been selling for years at London's Notting Hill Carnival. Both Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh invested in the business and within six weeks, his sauce was bottled and on supermarket shelves. Recipe books, TV shows and a restaurant, or 'rastaurant' followed.
He is the youngest of five children born in Jamaica. When he was four, his parents went to build a new life in the UK. Each year one of his siblings came to join the family in Britain. When Levi was 10, he left his much loved grandmother behind, never to see her again. Unable to read or write when he started school, he caught up quickly. He became a Rastafarian as a teenager. Following school, he became an apprentice engineer but left that to pursue a career in music.
In his late twenties, he went to prison for five years. His time inside would prove to be a turning point for him. Music continued to play an important part in his life and he was nominated for a Best Reggae Act MOBO award in 1998.
A father of eight, he lives in Brixton, London.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My castaway this week is the entrepreneur Levi Roots. His food products, |
| 0:38.4 | recipe books, restaurants and coo-cucery shows are all inspired by his |
| 0:41.8 | Jamaican heritage for years in his Brixton |
| 0:44.4 | kitchen he'd been boiling up endless bubbling pans of his special recipe condiment |
| 0:49.1 | to sell at the Notting Hill Carnival. Its name, reggae, source. Put simply, it was the music that inspired |
| 0:56.0 | the source that inspired the business. And it was thanks to his winning appearance on BBC |
| 1:00.4 | II's Dragons Den back in 2007. He sang and strummed a guitar to pitch for investment, |
| 1:06.2 | that a cottage industry is now a multi-million pound success story. |
| 1:10.5 | His life hasn't always read like a fairy tale. |
| 1:13.0 | He was born one of five children in the Caribbean and brought up by his grandmother, |
| 1:17.0 | but by the time he made the long journey to the UK to join his parents, he was 11 and still unable to read or write. As a teenager he spent |
| 1:26.2 | time in a detention centre. Later there was a spell in prison. In fact it was his second stint |
| 1:31.6 | behind bars that he credits with turning his life around. |
| 1:35.0 | But through it all, there has always been the music, including performances with James Brown |
| 1:40.1 | and Maxi Priest. |
| 1:41.5 | He says, Food is fun! The kitchen's not a boring place. You should be able to |
| 1:46.0 | express yourself and combine your music, your food and your ingredients in much the same way as an orchestra |
| 1:52.1 | does on stage. |
| 1:53.5 | Sir, welcome Levi Roots. |
... |
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