Chris Cutler, the drummer of Henry Cow, explains

"RIO, short for Rock In Opposition was named to give some identity to a festival we (Henry Cow) ran in London in the Spring of 1978. We invited four groups we'd met while we were touring in Europe. We thought they were making serious and excellent music but, because of the dominance of the major record companies and general Anglo American chauvinism, they had no distribution and no public. Doors were closed to them and people like them. We had trodden that path ourselves. It was obvious that if we wanted to do concerts and make records, we had to do it ourselves. No point in waiting for the industry to help out. In that respect we were in opposition I guess - to the indifference of the music industry and their press poodles. However, the selection of groups we invited was made on strictly musical grounds. Politics didn't come into it at all.

  
We called the festival Rock In Opposition because that's good marketing. It created a front that looked organised and gave journalists a hook to hang their stuff on, even at the time we were thinking it was a mistake to say 'in opposition' - so negative. Say what you're against and the thing you're against defines you. We thought it would be better to say what we were for. But that's not so sexy and you don't get the press. So. RIO it was. It sounded good. And it spread like a virus. So. After the festival the groups got together and said, let's keep it going. For a short time then, here was a small collection of groups working under the name RIO, running festivals, organising tours in their various countries.

 
The only groups ever involved were: Henry Cow, Samla Mammas Manna (Sweden), Etron Fou Leloublan, (France) Stormy Six (Italy), Univers Zero and Aqsak Maboul (Belgium), Art Zoyd (France) and Art Bears. Nine months later it was all over and the name passed into the public domain - to be used by all sorts of people to mean all sorts of things. That virus again. The formal organisation folded. I guess because it was no longer needed. Recommended Records carried on with record distribution. Independent organisations rolled on and spread. Maybe that was political, in the broadest sense, but the idea that "all bands... were basically of a left-of-centre political hue" is beside the point. Anyway it's not true. A couple were, others weren't much interested in politics. And then there was Univers Zero. Our solidarity was strictly musical and organisational, never political. And it did the trick."