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Yesterday was the birthday of Elvis Presley and David Bowie. While the King’s King’s would-be 77th birthday was celebrated in style with a peanut butter banana and bacon sandwich (or some variation thereof, be it cupcakes or a muffin – or if you’re Noel Fielding, an egg salad with candles around it), the media celebrated the fact that the Bowie is now pensioner’s age. How disappointing.

Most of my impressions of Elvis come from what I’ve read and personal family stories. My absolute favourite story about Elvis, though, is the one told by Alice Cooper when he hosted the British pop quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. (That was a good episode, by the way, and worth the watch if you can find it. The whole episode used to be on YouTube.)

At least one song of Elvis’s that I’m familiar with comes courtesy of Queen. I’ve never listened to the original, although Queen’s version is quite blistering and full of unbridled energy.

I’m more familiar with David Bowie’s music than Elvis’s (at least three or four years ago I was a massive Bowie fan, becoming immersed in his work, and still own most of his albums from his seventies period and some of his forays into the early eighties), however honouring his birthday seems to be decidedly harder than Elvis’s judging by the most exciting thing that could be reported is his pensioner age. Actually, the most exciting thing is a Twitter trend from fans to make him come out of retirement and have a comeback gig.

Besides sharing a birth date, the closest the two stars ever came together (to my knowledge, at least) was with the penning of the song “Golden Years”. According to some accounts, Bowie had written it for Elvis and offered it to him. The song was rejected, however, and Bowie recorded it. One can only imagine what would have happened if the song had been accepted and recorded by the King.

For the die-hard Bowie  fans, the music magazine UNCUT released an iPad edition of their limited edition David Bowie issue earlier last year. It’s going for $4.99 (Canadian) on iTunes. A while back I checked out the free lite version, which only really offers a minimal glimpse of the full app’s contents. If you want to explore more, you have to buy it. (Because I’m not the same massive fan that I was some years back, I still haven’t bought the app. I’m actually hoping for a price drop.) From the press release by NME,

David Bowie: The Ultimate Music Guide’ gives an overview of The Thin White Duke’s five-decade long career with rare interviews taken from the archives of NME and Melody Maker, as well as newly-commissioned reviews of each of the singer’s studio albums.

Overall, there are more than 600 interactive pages, including Bowie‘s most iconic music videos, audio clips from singles, original album artwork and hundreds of rare and unseen photographs.