Ricky Gardiner (born 31 August 1948, Edinburgh, Scotland) is a guitarist and composer.
Gardiner joined his first band, "the Vostoks", at school in 1962. Next there were "the Kingbees" and "the System", with whom he formed Beggars Opera in 1969.
He has played in his own outfit with this band, "Beggars Opera", and also with friends David Bowie and Iggy Pop. For Bowie he played lead guitar on the 1977 album Low. For Pop he worked on his album Lust for Life the same year: the issue 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".
On 19 October 1977 Gardiner was selected by Tony Visconti to play guitar for the pre-recorded backing of Bowie's performance on "Heroes" on the BBC's Top of the Pops. The recording was made at Good Earth Studios in Soho, London with Bowie, Visconti and pianist Sean Mayes. Gardiner emulated Robert Fripp's guitar sound by using feedback as he had not realised an EBow had been used: "I was asked to reproduce Robert Fripp's line", he told Stephen Dalton in 2001, "I did not realise at the time that he [Fripp] had used an EBow. I did my best using feedback alone. As we went through the song, my amplifier started dying. As the song finished, so did the amp.".
Since the 1970s Gardiner has played and composed in a variety of music styles, including ambient, classical and rock.
In 2017 photographs Gardiner took at the Château d'Hérouville, during the making of David Bowie's Low album in 1977, were included in a hardcover book that accompanied the vinyl and CD box set of A New Career in a New Town (1977–1982), alongside photographs by Anton Corbijn, Helmut Newton, Andrew Kent, Steve Shapiro, Duffy and more.
Gardiner says he suffers from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which he believes he contracted through exposure to high levels of computer radiation and magnetic fields.