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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

[8][9] 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.

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.

Having relocated to Los Angeles during his Dio years, Robertson was intimately connected to the music scene that was developing and beginning to diversity the airwaves following the heavy rotation of grunge artists that began to wane following the genre's own peak in the late 1990s.

"I Just Wanna Be Loved" was featured on the WB television series Smallville, and released on the show's soundtrack.

"The new band, featuring guitarist Rowan Robertson and Finnish composer and bassist Marko Pukkila (formerly of Altaria)," was "writing original material" and was expected to debut and tour the United States and Europe in 2006 according to Blabbermouth.net.

He has also teamed up with longtime Black Sabbath keyboardist Geoff Nicholls, Nils Patrik Johansson, and others in a band called The Southern Cross.