A SHOP OWNER had the surprise of her life when none other than Nick Cave walked into her arms on an otherwise unassuming shift.
Ana Koutoulas and her best friend Elly Dineen-Griffen have owned Belmont's Utopian Thrift since May last year, when they decided it would be the perfect hole in the wall to explore their love of vintage while raising their babies.
They've had all sorts of clients since, but none with quite the star power of Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave.
"Honestly I thought my eyes were lying to me, after all, we are in Belmont," Ms Koutoulas said.
"However my hands believed what I was seeing and they started to shake, a lot, then my mouth said, 'G'day' and he said hello back and I started to calm down."
Ms Koutoulas has loved Nick Cave since she was 18, having first come across his work in the film The Proposition where he wrote the composition and Warren Ellis composed the soundtrack.
"It was so haunting, filled with carnage and desperation, it's laid in the pit of my stomach ever since," she said.
"Love at first sight, so to speak."
Cave dropped into the vintage shop last week, just hours before Ms Koutoulas and her partner Nathan saw his sold out show at Newcastle's Civic Theatre.
She said Cave was perusing the racks when he walked up and stroked her baby girl Wylah's head, who was sound asleep in her baby carrier.
"He asked me about her labour and talked about his own children's birth stories, commenting on the similarities," she said.
"He asked about my tattoos, a native Australian tree and a Dolly Parton tattoo in particular, which we had a shared love of, which obviously thrilled me to bits.
"But to top it all off he said he wished he had come to our store before the tour started which was a massive compliment and very humbling."
All of that was before she'd even told Cave she knew who he was and asked for a photo.
Ms Koutoulas said most people have shared her utter disbelief that he discovered their little slice of vintage paradise in Belmont and have been "genuinely stoked" for them.
"[There's] a lot of friendly jealousy as so many of our friends and customers love the dark prince as much as I do," she said.
"Above all, everyone agrees the store and my baby girl Wylah are now eternally blessed having been touched by the holy man himself."
Conversation and Curiosity
Topics read recently that Nick Cave answers fan questions on The Red Hand Files website.
The iconic singer began doing this in 2018 to communicate outside "some of the more conventional ways of getting information across".
He emailed subscribers at the time and said: "You can ask me anything".
Given we've featured him in the article above, we thought we should share some of his musings.
In a recent response to fans' questions, he wrote: "A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.
"I have learned that it's best to retract, disengage and to change the subject once a conversation ceases to be in good faith. In general, I have found it to be a waste of time to expend too much energy on someone whose mind is fully made up, who does not understand the nature of conversation and the true value of disagreement.
"To me, it seems a kind of inverse metric often applies to these kinds of conversations - the shriller, more strident and more certain your interlocutor, the less they tend to know on the subject.
"I say this with a fair amount of discomfort because there are times when I have been that self-righteous person. Who hasn't? Who hasn't felt that near erotic charge when the wind is in the sails of a subject we know little about? As we grow into ourselves, hopefully we learn the folly of that.
"A good faith conversation understands fundamentally that we are all flawed and prone to the occasional lamentable idea. It understands and sympathises with the common struggle to articulate our place in the world, to make sense of it, and to breathe meaning into it.
"It can be illuminating, rewarding and of great value - a good faith conversation begins with curiosity, gropes toward awakening and retires in mercy."
Delve into the mind of Nick Cave at theredhandfiles.com.
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