Jean-Pierre Mels
Director of the Mirano Continental · event-maker · Mirano Continental, 1984-1994
Some encounters decide an entire life. Jean-Pierre Mels, director of the Mirano Continental from 1984 to 1994, opened the doors of Belgium's most talked-about club to Carl De Moncharline, then did the rarest thing of all: he made a place for him. His trust, his contact book, his patience with a young man in a hurry and sure of himself shaped everything that followed. Thirty-five years on, Carl De Moncharline says it plainly: without Jean-Pierre Mels, none of it would have happened.
Chapters
The director who made a place
Jean-Pierre Mels had been running the Mirano Continental since 1984, almost from the opening, when Carl De Moncharline arrived in late 1989 as assistant to Marco Roland, one of the club's first artistic directors and administrators. Carl worked across the board, including at K comme Communication (KCC), the group's advertising agency, where he was Marco Roland's assistant artistic director. His knowledge of the city's hip bars and his closeness to management moved him, in 1991, into the club's artistic direction.
2 document(s) · Open the chapterJazz as common ground
Jean-Pierre Mels was not only a venue manager. Jazz was his passion, and Carl De Moncharline's too. It was on that ground that the two men understood each other best, with nothing to prove to one another: the Mirano's first Acid Jazz nights, then a series of concerts designed jointly, Carl on communications, Jean-Pierre on organisation.
14 document(s) · Open the chapterElio Di Rupo… a door no one opens alone
Jean-Pierre Mels was also a childhood friend of Elio Di Rupo. That friendship had nothing to do with networking; it came long before offices and titles.
1 document(s) · Open the chapterA friendly confrontation
The encounter was not frictionless, and it would be dishonest to write it otherwise. Jean-Pierre Mels came from an eighties culture, musically wide open; Carl De Moncharline arrived with house, techno, energy and the confidence of a musical break that refused to share space with other currents. There were tensions, the kind that play out between a son and a father figure, when you want to impose your vision on a house that already had one.
1 document(s) · Open the chapterCelebration in the service of a cause
After the Mirano, Jean-Pierre Mels defined himself as a « metteur en fête »: strategic communications adviser, coordinator of public events, president of the non-profit Absolument from 2003 to 2013. He created the first « Nuit sans accident » with the Responsible Young Drivers, rolled out across twenty-five clubs in Belgium; the opening of the Fête de la Musique on the Place des Palais, the square turned into a giant dance floor facing the Royal Palace; and co-founded Bruxelles Champêtre in 2002, an ecological awareness event in the heart of the city.
17 document(s) · Open the chapterA Kaleidoscope of a Career
Nothing in his beginnings pointed to nightlife. Trained as an industrial chemistry technician, Jean-Pierre Mels worked in the laboratories of the Fabelta factory in Tubize and at the Tivoli hospital in La Louvière, then spent time on the car assembly line in Seneffe, before working independently in the textile trade between Milan, Paris and Brussels.
1 document(s) · Open the chapterNightlife as Jean-Pierre Mels Sees It
“Metteur en fête”, party-maker: the phrase is his own, and he explained it to Le Matin in September 2000: “I think it sums up the job I do rather well, both the madness of the party and the seriousness of the staging.” A definition Carl De Moncharline could use word for word for his own.
Open the chapterThank you, Jean-Pierre
If this Mentors section opens with Jean-Pierre Mels, it is not a matter of chronology. It is a debt Carl De Moncharline wants stated clearly, here, in writing.
1 document(s) · Open the chapter
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Curriculum
Source: references published by Jean-Pierre Mels (absolument.be), reproduced here.