RICKY GARDINER
Ricky Gardiner (born 1948, Edinburgh, Scotland) is a guitarist and composer. He has played in his own outfit, Beggars Opera, and also with David Bowie and Iggy Pop. For Bowie he played lead guitar on the 1977 album Low. He worked with Pop on Lust for Life the same year. The album included “The Passenger”, regarded as one of Pop’s best songs, for which Gardiner composed the music. Bowie biographer David Buckley described it as being “possessed with one of the greatest riffs of all time”. (More from Wikipedia)
In his Allmusic review of Lust for Life – featuring a smiling Iggy Pop on the front cover (unlike the fierce persona he presented on the Stooges album covers) – Mark Deming writes: “On The Idiot, Iggy Pop looked deep inside himself, trying to figure out how his life and his art had gone wrong in the past. But on Lust for Life, released less than a year later, Iggy decided it was time to kick up his heels, as he traded in the midtempo introspection of his first album and began rocking hard again. Musically, Lust for Life is a more aggressive set than The Idiot, largely thanks to drummer Hunt Sales and his bassist brother Tony Sales. The Sales [brothers] proved they were a world-class rhythm section, laying out power and spirit on the rollicking title cut [‘Lust for Life’], the tough groove of ‘Tonight’, and the lean neo-punk assault of ‘Neighborhood Threat’; and with guitarists Ricky Gardiner and Carlos Alomar at their side, they made for a tough, wiry rock & roll band – a far cry from the primal stomp of the Stooges, but capable of kicking Iggy back into high gear. . . . On Lust for Life, Iggy Pop managed to channel the aggressive power of his work with the Stooges with the intelligence and perception of The Idiot, and the result was the best of both worlds; smart, funny, edgy, and hard-rocking, Lust for Life is the best album of Iggy Pop’s solo career.”
(March 2017)
