TERRY: After leaving school at sixteen I began working in pubs and bars. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do career-wise but there was something about cooking programs that had always intrigued me from a young age. While my mates were playing the latest Nintendo games, I was transfixed by Keith Floyd cooking up a paella or Marco Pierre White showing how to create the perfect pasta. Keith, Gordon, Marco—these were my heroes (not forgetting Everton FC’s legends Neville Southall and Duncan Ferguson) growing up. As soon as I decided I wanted to get into cooking professionally, I never looked back. I’ve been living and breathing food ever since.
I first met George in a sticky-floored music venue in York around 2009. I had a week off from working for Paul (Heathcote) and was helping out on tour with a friend’s band. George was back home in Yorkshire taking a break from recording his second album in Brussels. We didn’t talk much that night, we just had a few drinks after the gig. Fast forward nine months and we’d both moved to London and started hanging out. I was working at HIX and George was just about to release his second album with One Night Only.
We’d eat out once or twice a week with friends on my nights off from the restaurant. This was all around the time that amazing pop-ups, supper clubs and, in fact, the whole street food revolution was just starting to really emerge. It was an exciting time, particularly as up until this point, you often had to spend quite a bit to get what all the “foodies” were talking about. Now everyone, including the younger generation, had access to incredible food at affordable prices.
I remember George and I going to Broadway Market in East London and picking up a delicious, quality beefburger for a fiver—little more than your average takeaway meal deal but so much more satisfying!
GEORGE: My mum is an incredible cook and there was always a delicious roast or pie in the oven; I enjoyed eating a good meal but in terms of cooking one myself—I didn’t know where to start! When the band and I started touring, I lived on junk food—it was a case of food as fuel to keep me going.
I started hanging out with Terry at his place and he casually got me involved with cooking. It was a very organic process; he never said, “Right, George, today I’m going to teach you how to fillet a piece of fish.” I do remember the first night we cooked together for some friends. We made these awesome short rib beefburgers with tarragon mayonnaise, crispy bacon, iceberg lettuce, sweet potato fries and green tomato ketchup and they went down a treat. I put some classic American vinyl on the record player and started to make some of our nutty White Russians. That was really the night that Check On was born. We were talking about how a lot of people will just get a case of beer and a couple of pizzas and leave it at that. Let’s be honest: it’s lazy and bad for you (I should know, I’d done it myself plenty of times).
We like to think we know how to put on a great party where everyone leaves happy, full and tipsy. I was running a club night in Camden at the time and Terry made these wicked Jack Daniels mince pies and a great spiced mulled cider for the Christmas party...people went crazy for them. It was a great night but it was the reaction to the food that was mind-blowing, especially as people kept coming up to ask where they could sample more of our food. We realized then that we really wanted to start doing pop-up events.
Trying new things with Terry, like making fresh pasta or learning to cook a perfect steak, just made me want to taste more, eat more and eventually cook more. Terry taught me the importance of quality ingredients and also that great food can be fun and imaginative without being intimidating. That’s the ethos we bring to every Check On event and what we want to share with you in this book.
When I think back to the kind of food I was eating on the first tour with the band I can’t believe how much has changed. Now, whenever we are in the recording studio together, I’m always the designated chef and . . . I love it. I’ll cook up a big stew or treat the lads to a beef Wellington. It’s not just about the food. We’ll all sit around the table together, switch off from work and relax. For me, the biggest buzz in cooking a meal for friends or family, is seeing them enjoy themselves and eating our food. That will never get old.
