Rowan Robertson

Rowan Wingate Robertson (born 22 November 1971) is an English rock guitarist who currently performs in the Las Vegas production show Raiding the Rock Vault and plays for Bang Tango.

He also plays for DC4.

Robertson also played guitar for AM Radio, Dio, Vast, and Violet's Demise.

Robertson has also done work as a film composer for director Amber Moelter's Dirty Step Upstage and has filmed numerous instructional guitar videos.

Rowan Robertson was recruited to join the band Dio when he was only 17 years of age.

The experience launched the young guitarist from obscurity to international fame nearly overnight.

News that the band Dio had replaced departing guitarist Craig Goldy with an unusually young guitar player circulated in hard rock and heavy metal magazines such as Hit Parader, Rip, and Circus months before Robertson's first and only album with the band, Lock Up the Wolves, was released.

As a Dio fan himself, Robertson became aware of Craig Goldy's departure from Dio after the band's Dream Evil album and subsequent tour.

Robertson began an earnest effort to make contact with the band's management, asking for a chance to audition.

His initial effort was unsuccessful.

After reaching out to the band's label, Phonogram Records, (not long after seeing Dio with Craig Goldy on guitars live at the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Castle, in the UK, in 1987), Robertson received a generic-in-nature response declining his request for a personal audition.

Robertson persisted and reached out to Dio's official fan club, hoping to reach someone closer to and with stronger personal ties to the band's management.

The latter effort proved successful.

The band's fan club forwarded Robertson's demo, this time leading to an audition.

At the beginning of 1989 Robertson was flown to Los Angeles for a formal audition with Ronnie James and Wendy Dio.

A second audition led to an offer and an official announcement that Robertson was now the band's official new guitarist.

Members of the press were invited to meet the new guitar player at Oliver's Pub, in New York City on 20 July 1989.

Between the Oliver's Pub event and the release of Lock Up the Wolves, media focus on the promising new guitar player was significant.

Lock Up the Wolves sessions initially included Jimmy Bain, Vinny Appice and Jens Johansson.

This line-up had already written and recorded parts of Lock Up the Wolves before Bain and Appice were replaced with Teddy Cook and former AC/DC drummer Simon Wright, respectively.

The album was released on 15 May 1990, and the band embarked on a tour in support of the album.

Lock Up the Wolves represented a clear evolution for Dio as a band.

Ronnie James Dio replaced his band's entire line-up from its previous album, but only after working with them to some degree on what would eventually become Lock Up the Wolves.

In this sense, the album was not an abrupt change from the band's previous work, but a protracted evolution in the band's sound that was ultimately delivered by one of the band's strongest line-ups.

By 1990 and 1991 the music industry would go through a pretty dramatic shift as Grunge began to make a commercially aggressive appearance in the music scene: Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, had already been signed to major labels and had performed well commercially by then.

Robertson's tenure in Dio was cut short by music industry persistence for a Ronnie James Dio reunion with Black Sabbath.

In 1991 it was announced that the highly anticipated reunion would take place.

At that time, the band, including Robertson, had been writing songs for an upcoming album that had been scheduled for a May 1991 release.

Once a Black Sabbath reunion with Ronnie James Dio was announced, what would have been Robertson's second album with Dio was shelved.

Robertson has confirmed the existence of rehearsal recordings for what would have been the follow-up to Lock Up the Wolves but he has stated these will remain archived and he does not feel comfortable releasing any of this to the public, maintaining he would have only done that with permission from Ronnie James Dio himself.

A reunion nearly took place in 2001 when Robertson was scheduled to replace Craig Goldy on tour in South Africa in support of Dio's then-new album Magica after Goldy suffered an injury.

However the September 11 attacks affected the band's tour plans.

A second stint for Robertson in Dio never materialised.

When Dio was put on ice due to the Ronnie James Dio-Black Sabbath reunion, Rowan Robertson began pursuing two new projects: work on an instruction video for guitar players and a new band with vocalist Oni Logan (formerly of Lynch Mob) and drummer Jimmy Paxson.

They began to record an album for Atlantic Records, but it was not released by the label at that time.

Atlantic Records eventually released the album – titled Revisited – in 2002 under a different band name: Logan-Robertson.

After Violet's Demise, Robertson spent three years doing session work in Los Angeles, as well as some work in Japan, where he toured briefly.

Robertson then worked with the VAST (Visual Audio Sensory Theater), founded and fronted by Jon Crosby, on the tour supporting the project's first album.

VAST took a theatrical approach to performances.

A Robertson reunion with Dio, which many fans had hoped for did not materialise before the singer's health declined, and he died in May 2010.