Jean-Pierre Mels

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.

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.

Those were probably the finest working moments they shared. When the music settles the argument, all that remains is the pleasure of building something together.

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.

It was through him that Carl De Moncharline met one of the most important political figures in the country. A kind word whispered at the right moment, with nothing to gain: that is how certain doors open, doors no file and no insistence will ever move. Jean-Pierre Mels did that for Carl, simply, because he believed in him.

The photograph below, taken in the late 1970s, belongs to that story. Two young men in black raincoats, friendship before anything else. Time has worn it, and that is exactly right.

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.

Jean-Pierre Mels never slammed the door. He listened, he took it, he stayed generous, and he let the new generation through. Looking back, Carl De Moncharline knows what that demanded in patience and perspective. We never thank enough those who let us make our mistakes without letting go of our hand.

More than thirty years later, the two men are still in touch. The friendship and respect have remained intact. That may be the finest proof that those confrontations never touched the affection.

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.

He also coordinated the organic markets of the Fête de l'Europe, the Fête du Vélo (Dring Dring), the Fête du Port de Bruxelles and the Fête de l'environnement, and co-founded the food stands of Mobilissimo, the sustainable mobility gathering.

This is where the parallel with Carl De Moncharline's own path reads most clearly: by day as by night, we both worked as much at night as by day, non-stop in fact. The same conviction that a nightlife organiser's craft can serve a public cause. Carl extended it in his own way, notably with his road-safety campaigns. You think you inherit a trade; above all you inherit a way of seeing.

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.

Thank you for the trust given without guarantees, for the doors opened with nothing asked in return, for the patience shown to a young man who was sometimes too sure of himself, and for the lesson that shaped everything: nightlife can be a serious trade, a generous one, useful to others.

Everything this site recounts began in the office of a man who said yes.