Opposing the Machine, prefabricated taste, barriers. Opposing the blindness that shot bands like the Residents, Pere Ubu, Devo and Suicide to legendary status while ignoring bands whose backgrounds didn't allow the construction of bizarre sales images.
The sweet smell of success became that of industrial effluent and the stars became faceless beings in radiation suits scurrying deviously through automated industrial landscapes. The UK Music Press was guilty of building up the image-appeal of those shining android mechanics from Akron / Cleveland / wherever, while remaining self-contained and unaware of alternative music from less photogenic origins. Cybernetic chic ruled, okay?
RIO was started by veteran outcasts, Henry Cow. Dismayed by the lack of awareness / interest shown towards new European music in this country, they organised a tour for five European bands and distributed records from alternative sources in Europe. All five bands, Cow included, worked in unusual areas of rock.
STORMY SIX, from Italy, were a strongly political band using folk instrumentation alongside heavy-duty gear. UNIVERS ZERO, Belgians, used violins, cello and bassoon and had similarities with MAGMA. SAMLA MAMMAS MANNA, from Sweden, a conventional quartet of bass, drums, guitar and keyboards who produced a very unconventional blend of improvised and structured rock. ETRON FOU LELOUBLAN (translation: 'Mad Shit'), from France, were a trio of bass, drums and sax performing very hard, complex rhythms, with nods in the direction of early Beefheart. Lastly came our own HENRY COW, whose improvisation / free rock shouldn't need an intro.
The first RIO gig was at the North London Poly in Islington, an adventurous piece of booking that went wrong. Twenty-five people had trudged through a miserable rainy evening (in 1978) to cluster in a large hall and hear Samla Mammas Manna and Etron Fou Leloublan. If it had been those mythic mysteriosos, THE RESIDENTS, on stage, they'd have been rioting at the doors to get in. Etron Fou played a steamroller set. Underpinned by maniac drummer, Guigou, who thundered around his drums and empty paint cans, Ferdinand rumbled along on bass and Francis ranged around the sax and harmonica. The Samla's emerged from the darkness improvising somewhere between Henry Cow and Can; formless guitar playing and dark roars of organ arranged around an axis of heavy drumming. The set progressed into a more constructed area (they called it "Legomusic"), discarding growling improvisation for an offbeat rhythmical style.
A forcibly brief chat with Guigou and Francis from Etron Fou elicited the facts that they lived on a self-built farm in Southern France, that the gig scene in France was sparse and that they didn't like the Pompidou Centre (a symbol of the bourgeois art they violently opposed). Their mastery of English was scant and, my French being non-existent, conversation was limited to monosyllables.
Hasse Bruniusson, drummer, and Lasse Holmer, keyboards, from Samla Mammas Manna are as fluent as the presumptuous Pom can expect. The Samlas come from Uppsala, a university town 60km north of Stockholm. Like here, the commercial and 'art' music scenes lived a wary co-existence.
"Our stars are not 'stars' like yours in England. Except Abba, of course. The so-called non-commercial scene is very strong in Sweden. There are seventy-two places around Sweden presenting this music. Not clubs, more like art centres with left-wing politics."
"We come from a typical university town, it's like Oxford. It's mostly people between 20 and 30. I don't really know what the young people are doing these days. They're probably more interested in the Abba scene."
"We don't have many music papers. We have Power Of Music that is a promising music paper. Some of the technical papers, which write about amplifiers and such, also write about progressive music."
"The scene in England isn't interested in Scandinavian music. It's very hard to get contacts here. You have to go through the management. Henry Cow is a unique thing in Europe because they're doing their own thing."
Some history, sill vooz plate.
"We started playing when Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew' came out in '69. We had listened to Zappa, too. But we are more influenced by the English music like henry Cow and Robert Wyatt. We are listening to German free jazz now, but we're not a jazz group. We are a free-form rock group. There aren't many free-form rock groups around. King Crimson was a big influence. That kind of romantic thing they got into, we have it too. We have some Swedish folk music in us, too."
All the RIO bands are political to varying degrees. English kids took TRB or The Clash as the ultimate in rock polemics, whereas "Sur Le Continong" many bands are strongly revolutionary. Does it work out?
"Now we have an employment crisis in Sweden and the money is worth less. Some groups are working for art's sake and others want to turn more socialistic. They are taking traditional folk with rock and putting in socialist lyrics. It sounds like Abba if you don't listen to the lyrics."
Sweden isn't as liberal (either sexually or musically) as you might imagine, and alternative music still has the same battle to survive as elsewhere. Politicised, like Stormy Six, and based similarly in native folk, the Samlas took a different course to the ten-a-penny politico-folkies and introduced - gasp! - Electricity and then Improvisation into their music. Their live concerts included improvisation alongside their quirky, almost twee chamber rock.
But it was not until their fourth album, 'Schlagerns Mystik' (Silence Records SRSCD 3610) that they included both on record. Even then, it was in the form of a double album - one record formal, one improvised, and with a dotted line down the spine of the double sleeve implying you should treat the two as separate albums.
"Before 1977, we were playing constructed material. In 1977 we changed. We played a series of totally improvised concerts and the public reaction was quite aggressive. They hadn't heard this sort of thing before. We are trying to find a level between the two now. We have recorded a double album in Sweden. One record is improvised live and the other is short songs, almost pop music ... Edith Piaf a little SLAPP HAPPY, too."
In the formal area, they exude a mild, offbeat personality, but in their improvised pieces they really do a Jekyll and Hyde number; clattering rhythms, swirling, spontaneous themes and a maelstrom of other instruments.
Texturally akin to Henry Cow (as are, incidentally, Univers Zero), the Samlas' wide-ranging improvisations give testimony to a diverse and exciting side to Swedish music.
Most music reaches you via an army of corporation dummies who mould your tastes. There's no reason why you shouldn't still like the RIO bands, except that the Machine doesn't want you to. "Rock In Opposition" as a concert/promotional organisation no longer exists, but the Samlas have reformed and most of the RIO albums are still available.