Inside Out
German record label InsideOut, home to such names as Spock’s Beard, Steve Hackett and most recently Dream Theater, celebrated a quarter century of existence this year. Prog meets its founder to discuss the label’s journey, and its future.
Celebrating 25 years of the pioneering progressive rock record label.
Thomas Waber isn’t a man given to unnecessary histrionics. The 48-year-old German is the model of Teutonic directness. His conversation is articulate and efficient, his answers blunt and honest. So when he describes something as “an existential crisis”, you know he’s not exaggerating.
The flashpoint he’s referring to came in the summer of 2009. The label Waber spent 16 years building, InsideOut Music, had gone from fringe concern to progressive rock powerhouse. They had released records by Spock’s Beard, Transatlantic, Symphony X, The Flower Kings, Devin Townsend and dozens more acts who helped shape the landscape of modern prog.
In the 1990s, the mainstream music industry viewed the prog scene with the same affection it would a leper colony – studiously keeping a safe distance. But the success of InsideOut took everyone by surprise. Everyone except Thomas Waber, at least.
In 2000, Waber signed a deal with a major German distribution company. The deal would extend InsideOut’s reach hugely across Europe and into America. It meant they could put out more records, offer heftier advances, sign bigger names. But the upward swing shuddered to a halt in 2009 when InsideOut’s parent company filed for
bankruptcy. It was no fault of Waber’s, but the result was the same: one of prog’s figurehead labels was perilously close to having the plug pulled on it.
“Was I worried? Of course,” he says. “That was a very difficult time.”
Thanks to a combination of business smarts, brinksmanship and sheer bloody-mindedness, Waber managed to save InsideOut. But he didn’t just drag the label back from the edge of doom. He found a way to give it a new lease of life. Nearly a decade on from that near-extinction event, InsideOut are stronger than ever. And 25 years after the label was founded, it stands as one of the great bastions of the genre.
“InsideOut are 100 per cent responsible for prog’s ongoing success over the last 25 years,” says ex-Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy, who’s known Waber since the early 90s and whose bands Transatlantic and Sons Of Apollo have both released albums on the label. “They carried the flag when nobody else would. So many bands have had an outlet because of InsideOut.”
Thomas Waber is a child of the 80s. The first Genesis album he bought was Abacab, at the age of 11. He grew up feeling like he’d missed out on prog’s golden era. “When I started listening to this kind of music in the early 80s, I thought, ‘Wow, I missed all the good stuff, because it all happened in the 70s,’” he says.
We’re sitting in a boardroom in the London offices of InsideOut’s parent company, Century Media, who are in turn owned by major label Sony Music. For someone who is an outlier on the bigger music industry spectrum, he looks at home here. But it’s a role he’s grown into. He’s definitely a prog fan who started a label all those years ago,
“You’ve got people who like Yes and Genesis and Steve Hackett and everything else, and they’re really snobbish about that. They would never check out Leprous or Haken or Animals As Leaders. Whether they’d like it or not, they wouldn’t even give it a try.”
Thomas Waber