The other four finalists were The National Gallery and V&A East Storehouse, both in London, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, and Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, with each one set to receive £20,000.

June Sarpong OBE, broadcaster and judge for the awards, said what had stood out with The Box was “the sense of pride and connection it has created across Plymouth”.

She said: “It is a museum that genuinely belongs to the people it serves.

“Through exhibitions that uncover overlooked histories to welcoming spaces for learning and creativity, The Box is reimagining what being a museum can mean.”

Follow BBC Devon on X, external, Facebook, external and Instagram, external. Send your story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk, external.

Recognising those challenges, efforts to support new music are springing up around the UK.

In Halifax, proceeds from shows at The Piece Hall, an outdoor venue that can hold up to 6,000 people, help to subsidise five other, smaller venues.

Liverpool’s city council offers grants of up to £3,000 to venues with a capacity of less than 30.

And in London, the O2 and the Royal Albert Hall both donate money from ticket sales to the Music Venue Trust.

There are calls for the government to add a £1 levy to all arena and stadium gigs, but, so far, ministers seem inclined to keep the scheme voluntary – and big promoters such as Live Nation are opting out.

Meanwhile, this February, nightclubs and grassroots spaces were excluded from the business rates relief scheme, despite the venues’ rateable value skyrocketing by 56% since 2017.

Tilbrook says that needs to change.

“I think there needs to be legislation [to protect venues], even if it’s just a cut in VAT,” he argues.

“If there’s no provision for low-key or cheaper entertainment, then those places will disappear.

“I’ve already seen it happen.”

The Everywhere At Once Festival, produced with the support of the National Lottery, runs from 26-28 June.

You can find the shows nearest to you on the Everywherefest website., external

BETH ORTON

The Ground Above (Partisan)

From gaining her creative chops listening to the likes of John Martyn and Rickie Lee Jones to mastering her craft and being dubbed the queen of ‘folktronica’ in a short space of time with two career-defining late-90s albums, Trailer Park and Central Reservation, Beth Ortonhas remained prolific since. The Ground Above is her ninth album, and it’s also the sound of Orton reflecting – on grief, and all that has gone down since those early years.

More weathered and forthright than what has come before, with Adrian Utley from Portishead on board too, Orton’s unfiltered voice cuts to the bone throughout here. The title cut is certain to stop any listener in their tracks, its profound and brittle beauty augmented by organic, ambient backing, Waiting, where Orton accompaniers herself on Rhodes piano, is equally striking. A heart-grabbing, immersive listening experience, The Ground Above comes highly recommended.

words DAVID NOBAKHT

David Clayton-Thomas, the Canadian frontman of Blood, Sweat & Tears, has died aged 84.

The Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter passed away peacefully at a Toronto hospital on Wednesday, his publicist, Eric Alper, said. No cause of death was provided.

Clayton-Thomas is a Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee, known for voicing hits like You’ve Made Me So Very Happy and Spinning Wheel.

The music legend sold more than 40 million records and helped shape the sound of jazz-rock in a career that started in the streets of Toronto and led to major stages like Woodstock.

As a teen, Clayton-Thomas lived on the streets and passed through a series of jails and reformatories. There he taught himself to play the guitar, finding his passion while performing concerts in jail.

Clayton-Thomas joined the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968, becoming a crucial members of what became one of most popular groups of the late 1960s.

The same year, the band’s self-titled album sold ten million copies worldwide, topping the Billboard chart for seven weeks. It won five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, beating the Beatles’ Abbey Road.

They had three other signature hits that each reached No 2 on the Billboard Hot 100: You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, And When I Die, and Clayton-Thomas’s own composition, Spinning Wheel.

In 1970, the band became the first rock group to break through the Iron Curtain, touring eastern Europe at the request of the US state department.

A 2023 documentary, What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears”, later reported that the Nixon administration had given Clayton-Thomas an ultimatum to go on the tour in exchange for US permanent residency , or be forced to leave the country.

The band faced blowback at the time for associating itself with the administration, particularly from antiwar activists.

Clayton-Thomas left the band in 1972, attributing his departure to exhaustion from years of relentless touring.

He later released more than a dozen solo albums and toured by himself before rejoining the band that brought him to fame in the early 1980s.

Clayton-Thomas is survived by his daughters, Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham.

A memorial concert celebrating his life and music will be held at a later date, with proceeds benefiting Peacebuilders Canada, a cause he cherished, his publicist said.

An acclaimed name in Welsh fiction for over a decade, with Red Dragon Song – a novel in the romantasy subgenre, published this month – Rebecca F John adopts the pen name Catrin Cadogan and adapts the tales of the Mabinogion on which she was raised. She fielded some questions about it from Antonia Levay.

What first inspired you to create Red Dragon Song?

The seeds were initially planted by my publisher and editor at Harper North, Genevieve, who, having witnessed the successful rise of fantasy novels featuring dragons in recent years, longed to see more Welsh dragons taking centre stage. She was hoping to find a Welsh writer to bring the idea to life, and we were happily introduced.

It’s based on the story of Lludd and Llefelys in the Mabinogion, which features a country beset by three plagues, as Red Dragon Song does. We agreed we wanted to develop a story based loosely on the Mabinogion, rather than remaining completely true to the source text. That essentially shaped where I was able to take my protagonist Arianwen’s story.

How did the idea develop from concept to finished work?

Romantasy is an entirely new genre for me, so the next consideration was finding my way into the story; knowing and understanding the characters. Though Arianwen is 20 years younger than me, I soon felt a real affinity with her – she is fascinated by the sea, as I am, a keen horsewoman as I once was, and a musician, as I could have claimed to be many years ago! I felt certain that if I had a good basis in characters who were honest, interesting, and relatable, they would be able to carry a world in which dragons might swoop by at any moment.

Arianwen was partly why I decided to write it in the first person instead of third -something I’ve always been afraid of doing, but I think it lends the novel a pace which might otherwise have been lacking, and allows me to explore a different tone. The final decision which took me out of my comfort zone was to use a split narrative; the novel is largely narrated by Arianwen, however, there are some chapters from the male love interest, Edern’s, point of view. This proved important as both Arianwen and Edern set out on important quests in this novel, which they do not initially reveal to one another.

Did you surprise yourself in the process of creating this novel?

Absolutely. I wasn’t sure I could write dragons convincingly – I’d never tried it before! When I came to create the main dragon, it was initially male, but I was compelled to make her female. I wanted her to be sympathetic, not scary, so I named her Rhosyn – meaning rose, for its delicacy – and I paired her with a male dealer, Edern, who was just a bit too full of himself. This allowed me to write Rhosyn with a degree of impatience towards Edern – as though they were an old married couple – which brought her to life for me.

The title Red Dragon Song evokes strong Welsh imagery. How does Welsh culture, history, or identity influence its themes?

It’s the first time I have written Welsh characters moving through a Welsh landscape in long form. That’s influenced the imagery, the language and dialogue, and the themes. I think that, as a nation, we hold on quite tightly to our history – there are supposedly over 600 castles in Wales, so it’s fairly simple to visit a castle and learn about its past.

History has certainly influenced the themes of Red Dragon Song. The traditional conflict of good versus evil, the prevalence of stories told and shared, the impact of stories of the past on the present and the characters, and also the necessary coexistence of people and nature. I think our identity as people who are passionate about their land and story is evident throughout the novel, but there can be a tendency to view that passion as something quite twee.

This style of storytelling is incredibly popular, with authors like Sarah J. Maas creating epic storylines and becoming huge names in the genre. Why do you think romantasy has become so popular?

Reading allows me, for a short while, to become people in locations or occupations that I will never reach or achieve. It offers me, in essence, more life. There’s an argument that, in our fast-paced world, we’ve never needed escapism more – it’s possible, then, that the worlds of romantasy are the perfect place to escape to.

Equally, fiction is often the best platform through which to explore the truth of the human experience. Where else can we enter the minds of people so dramatically different than ourselves? Perhaps, then, the escape into fiction is as much about gaining some relief from the real world as it is about better equipping oneself to move through that world as a fuller, more thoughtful human being.

What has Red Dragon Song’s reception, or how people have connected with it, taught you?

I’d assumed my readers would be exclusively dedicatees of romantasy fiction, but that hasn’t been the case at all. Some readers have come to the story because of the genre, certainly, but others because of the Welsh element, or because they know my historical fiction writing – and what I’d not expected was for many of them to say, “I would have known that was your writing anywhere.” It seems that what you might call my voice is discernible whatever the genre, and I really like that idea. Someone told me once that I write in a Welsh accent – but perhaps what they hear is my excitement around the possibility of language, and how much I love doing what I do.

What message or emotional experience do you hope audiences take away from Red Dragon Song?

There are so many answers to this question! Firstly, I really wanted Red Dragon Song to be a celebration of the natural world – the characters live in close connection to the natural world in a way most of us certainly don’t today. It is also a love letter to the landscapes of Wales. I wanted to honour those two aspects of Wales, and encourage the reader to pause and look closer at the wonder that is right on their doorstep.

Secondly, I wanted to offer the reader a young protagonist who is reaching for a better understanding of the world and her place within it. Arianwen doesn’t set out from home to search for a husband, or to find easy comfort, or for the sake of adventure – she’s seeking is her purpose. I think a lot about purpose as a writer: what am I aiming for in my career? What am I giving back to my community? What am I providing for my family? I think putting a story into the world is hugely important – that is my purpose – but Arianwen, like many young people, hasn’t found hers yet, and perhaps I wanted to encourage readers to go out and seek their purpose with the same bravery as Arianwen. Finally, I’m always keen to end my novels with a sense of hope. I tend to put my characters through the mill a little, but I never want to leave my readers on a note of pessimism. So as Arianwen rises towards the new and unknown at the end of the novel, she is carrying with her heartache and doubt – but she is also looking forward with enthusiasm to whatever comes next.

Red Dragon Song is out now via HarperNorth.

Price: £18.99/£12.99 Ebook/£17.99 audiobook. Info: here

words ANTONIA LEVAY