There is a type of business traveller who has made the road their office. They know which hotels have a kettle worth using, which motorway services are best avoided and exactly how many nights away they can manage before the body starts to protest. They pack the same essentials every time, not out of superstition but because experience has taught them what keeps them working.

Beverley Knight has lived that life for 30 years. Since her debut album, The B-Funk, arrived in 1995, she has released nine studio albums, toured relentlessly, collected an MBE for services to music and the Freedom of the City of Wolverhampton, and built a second career as one of the West End’s most bankable leading ladies. She has been Rachel Marron in The Bodyguard, Grizabella in Cats and Deloris van Cartier in Sister Act, and in 2023 she won an Olivier Award for playing Emmeline Pankhurst in Sylvia.

For anyone who spends their working life between venues, hotel rooms and early trains, she is the ultimate case study in how to stay at the top of your game when you are rarely at home. And, as it turns out, a great deal of that comes down to what she eats and drinks.

A Jamaican kitchen in the West Midlands

Knight was born Beverley Anne Smith in Wolverhampton in 1973, the daughter of Jamaican parents, and the food of her childhood was the food of the island.

“I grew up on Jamaican food,” she says. “Oxtail, stew peas, jerk, fish escabeche, bully beef, curry goat… Both my mum and dad could really cook.”

There were limits, however, even for a child raised on the classics. “They even tried to get us to eat ‘cow foot’, which I refused to do. Just ‘no’. That’s proper old-school Jamaican.”

Getting hold of the right ingredients in 1970s and 1980s Wolverhampton was less of a challenge than you might expect, thanks to the city’s diversity and a network of local knowledge that any seasoned traveller would recognise.

“We’d go up the market and you knew who to go to,” she says. “Wolverhampton is so diverse: a huge Sikh community with Muslims and Hindus too. We share similar herbs and spices in our cooking, and things like yams, green banana… We’d go to Mrs Patel, my friend’s mum, for goat.”

It is a lovely detail, and a reminder that the best local intelligence rarely comes from a guidebook. Every city has its Mrs Patel, the person who knows where the good stuff is, and the smartest travellers make a point of finding them. Wolverhampton and the wider West Midlands are also firmly back on the business map, with UK business travel shifting beyond London as regional cities see a 12.5% surge.

The flavour of the old school

Flavour Of The Old School was one of the standout songs on that first album, so what, for her, is the taste of home?

“When I think of home and growing up, the first thing I think of is my Sunday dinner,” she says. “It was rice ‘n’ peas, chicken, and carrot cutlets, my mum’s invention: grated carrots, bound together with egg, seasoned, then roasted in the oven. Deee-licious.”

Carrot cutlets do not appear in any Jamaican cookbook that we are aware of. They are a family recipe in the truest sense, the kind of invention that happens when a cook from one culture makes a life in another and works with what the local market offers. Anyone who has eaten their way around a diaspora community, from Brixton to Brooklyn, will recognise the spirit of it.

Sticky toffee and toad in the hole

British food came later, and it came via the school canteen.

“School dinners were when I first tasted traditional British food,” she says. “Sticky toffee pudding, toad in the hole… They sounded very odd to me. It was also my first exposure to convenience food.”

Her mother, it seems, was having none of it. “At home my mum would say ‘You’re not having that rubbish!'”

It is a line that will make many readers of a certain age smile. The divide between the food of home and the food of the outside world is one that plenty of second-generation Britons know well, and one that business travellers experience in reverse every time they step off a plane and go looking for something that tastes of where they actually are.

The chef at home

These days the cooking in the Knight household is largely done by someone else. Her husband, James O’Keefe, whom she married in 2012, trained as a chef.

“My husband does most of the cooking. He trained as a chef originally. But I’ve taught him the ways of Jamaica…” she says. “He cooks ackee and saltfish better than me, and it really upsets me to say that!”

His secret is one that any food-minded traveller will appreciate: go to the source. “He upgraded it by using freshly salted fish from the fishmonger’s instead of the packet job most of us get from the supermarket.”

Nor is she a food snob about the dishes of her adopted national cuisine. Shepherd’s pie, she says, is “one of the best things out of England”, particularly when it is made by a friend.

“Especially when my friend James Lloyd, who’s an outrageously good private chef, does it, because he mixes in sweet potato. Ah, heaven.”

Sweet potato in a shepherd’s pie is the kind of small cross-cultural twist that sums up modern British food, and a neat metaphor for Knight herself, a Black Country girl with Caribbean roots who became a national treasure.

Three takes and out

Thirty years is a long time in any industry, and Knight has watched hers change almost beyond recognition.

“I hardly recognise it,” she says. “I recorded reel-to-reel back then. You made a mistake, you went back to the beginning. So you sang it right, as close to the first time as you could.”

That discipline has never left her. “Typically, I don’t do more than three takes, ever. That discipline has helped my live work.”

There is a lesson in that for anyone whose job involves standing up in front of a room, whether it is a festival crowd of thousands or a boardroom of six. Preparation is what makes it look effortless, and the habit of getting it right first time is one worth keeping, even when technology offers endless second chances.

The least rock ‘n’ roll rider in britain

For the business traveller, perhaps the most fascinating part of the Knight routine is her rider, the list of requests that every touring performer sends ahead to a venue. It is, in effect, a corporate travel policy for the dressing room, and hers is admirably sensible.

“It’s all very boring, but good,” she says. “Herbal teas, ginger, lemon, nuts and honey, of the genuine manuka variety, because I’m a diva don’t you know! I’m trying to be healthy.”

Her band, it turns out, have rather different priorities. “The rider for my band is markedly different: crisps, wine, Haribo, Courvoisier… All the fun stuff that’s gonna do me in.”

It is the difference between the colleague who orders a green juice at the airport lounge and the one who is on their second gin before boarding, and most of us have been both at some point. Knight’s approach, though, is the one that has kept her performing at the highest level for three decades.

Sweets in the band room

She has spoken in the past about a weakness for sweets, and she has dealt with it in the way that any seasoned traveller deals with the hotel minibar: by keeping temptation out of reach.

“I’ve made an effort not to eat sweets. They go in the band room. And if they’re not in the room I can’t eat them.”

For her, it is about far more than sugar. “Sweets are a metaphor for being disciplined in what I do, maintaining standards.”

Anyone who has faced a week of client dinners, conference buffets and complimentary biscuits will understand exactly what she means. The discipline is not in resisting temptation every time, it is in arranging your surroundings so that you do not have to.

A strong cuppa, and never milk first

On the matter of what she drinks, she is as precise as she is on stage.

“A cuppa. Strong, zero sugar,” she says. “The milk should never go in first, either, always last so you don’t risk it being milky.”

She has a more refined side too. “I like matcha when I’m being posh, and when I’m performing I like a little kombucha. If it’s herbal, I adore rooibos and I like things with liquorice because it’s good for the voice. Pukka peppermint and liquorice is delicious.”

For anyone whose job depends on their voice, from sales directors to conference speakers, it is advice worth packing. A box of herbal teabags weighs next to nothing, fits in any carry-on and turns a hotel kettle into something rather more useful than a machine for reheating yesterday’s instant coffee.

Samosa saturday at Molineux

Knight is one of Wolverhampton Wanderers’ most famous supporters, and when she goes to Molineux the pre-match meal is not up for discussion.

“You can’t say you’re a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan if you haven’t joined in with my mate Manny Singh Kang’s ‘Samosa Saturday’ at the ground,” she says. “He won a Pride Of Britain Award. He’s a legend.”

She is not exaggerating. Kang began selling home-made samosas outside Molineux in 2018 to raise money for Dementia UK, making £3,000 on the first day. Six years and several marathon charity walks later, he had raised more than a quarter of a million pounds and was named ITV Fundraiser of the Year at the 2024 Pride of Britain Awards, with Knight among the first to send her congratulations.

It is another reminder that the best food in any city is often found in the least likely places, in this case a samosa stall outside a football ground. Visiting fans and business travellers heading to the Black Country will find Wolverhampton an easy hop from Birmingham, and our guide to mastering Birmingham, the country’s most central airport, will get you there without fuss.

The godmother of rock ‘n’ roll

When we spoke, Knight was preparing for the role that would take her back to the stage in 2025 and on into the West End this year: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the gospel singer and guitarist often called the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll, in the UK premiere of George Brant’s play with music, Marie & Rosetta.

“So excited,” she says. “I always do deep-dive research when I have a stage role. I couldn’t believe how she was treated after she was gone. For a while she didn’t even have a marker on her grave. Back in the 1930s, she virtually invented the guitar solo!”

The production, directed by Monique Touko, opened at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in May 2025 before transferring to Chichester, and arrived at @sohoplace in London’s West End in March 2026, with Ntombizodwa Ndlovu as Tharpe’s protégée Marie Knight. The reviews were glowing, and for many critics it was the role Knight had been waiting her whole career to play: a Black woman who changed popular music and was very nearly written out of its history.

It is an irresistible piece of casting. Tharpe was one of the great touring artists of the 20th century, criss-crossing America and later Europe at a time when finding a hotel that would accept a Black performer was its own daily battle. Knight, a woman who has spent her life on the road, clearly felt the connection.

Strict but loving

For all the glamour of the West End, Knight is disarmingly honest about the qualities that got her there.

“I’m a total nerd, and I don’t care,” she says. “I was all over my studies as a child. That’s why my parents gave me free rein to throw myself into theatre, into singing.”

Her parents, she says, were strict but supportive, and ahead of their time. “They were strict but loving, more forward-thinking than other Jamaican parents of their generation. I owe a lot to my parents.”

It is a fitting place to end up, back with the family and the Sunday dinners of Wolverhampton. The discipline of her mother’s kitchen, where convenience food was “rubbish” and carrot cutlets were an art form, runs straight through to the three-take rule, the herbal tea rider and the sweets banished to the band room.

Soul food for the road

So what can the business traveller learn from Beverley Knight? Find your Mrs Patel in every city you visit. Pack the herbal tea, and a jar of the good honey if you can. Keep temptation in the band room rather than your own. Get it right in three takes. And when the road leads you somewhere unexpected, like a samosa stall outside a football ground, take the time to join in.

Above all, perhaps, never forget where you came from. Knight’s roots are in Jamaica by way of Wolverhampton, and it is a heritage she celebrates every time she sits down to eat. For those inspired to taste the real thing, the island is gearing up for a strong winter, with Sandals betting $200m on a Jamaica comeback as three flagship resorts head for reopening. Just, perhaps, skip the cow foot.