Bonjour! Itâs Nancy here â from the soon-to-be world famous pop group Nancy and the Meerkats!
After our first record âPut Your Paws Upâ became a massive hit, weâre off on a huge tour of the UK!
We havenât quite made it to stadium status yet â some of the venues are more Weeny than Wembley â but Iâm going to be letting you know whatâs been going on each day in my journal for Fun Kids!
Today was the very first date of the tour and I was a little bit surprised when we turned up at the venue â it looked like an old peopleâs home!
I checked with Big Joe (heâs our manager) but he was too distracted by this really, really, really old instrument called a theatre organ!
Doesnât he know Nancy and the Meerkats are supposed to be the coolest band in all the world? We donât want to be bothering with things that are hundreds of years old!
But according to Big Joe, the guy who invented it was almost as cool as us!
He was called Robert Hope-Jones and was building organs almost 130 years ago! They were so much bigger and better than anything before that some people thought theyâd replace orchestras!
I told Big Joe that Nancy and the Meerkats are going to be bigger and better than anything before in pop music but he wasnât impressed!
Mr Hope-Jones was such a success that he left his home in Birkenhead to take his inspiring ideas to America and ended up joining the famous, music-making Wurlizer brothers!
Robert patented dozens of inventions! Big Joe explained to me earlier that patenting is a way to protect things you invent!
What is patenting?
A patent protects inventions.
How they are work, what they do, how they do it, what they are made of and how they are made. It means that no-one can copy, make, sell or import your invention without your permission.
One of Robertâs other famous patents was a Diaphone horn which is what lighthouses use to warn ships!
Big Joe suggested we try out the organ and see if we could use it in our of our shows!
Quelle horreur! Imagine what that terrible tabby Kitty Perry would say if she heard that we had an organ in the show!
Sheâd tell everyone we were all about OAPs when we wanna be all about the OMGs!
But then we tried it out and it sounded amazing â a bit like the noise our keyboards make but much, much louder!
Weâre about to go on stage now â hopefully the fans will love it!
Listen to this episode of Nancy and the Meerkats belowâŠ
Click here to listen to series 2 Episode 2!
And if you want to get really creative, make sure you check out how to protect your cracking ideas! Click here to find out more!
Nancy and the Meerkats is supported by the Intellectual Property Office.
Click here to find out more!