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.

What happened there appears on no org chart. An established, respected man, running the most coveted house in the country, looked at a twenty-year-old and decided to trust him. He did not supervise him, he did not hold him back: he made a place for him. Very few people at that level agree to step back so that someone else can step forward.

He opened his contact book asking nothing in return, introduced Carl to his sponsors, his clientele, the press, the leading figures of Brussels and Belgium, vouching for him every time. He helped him write his first press releases and sponsorship files, those craft gestures no school teaches and which, once passed on, are never lost.

The Mirano was not just another club. On the very short list of genuinely essential venues of the era, alongside the Palace in Paris, Studio 54 in New York and the Roxy in Amsterdam, it held its own. Starting there, carried by the trust of the venue's own director, is a privilege whose value Carl De Moncharline still measures today.