The king and the thin white duke

Had he lived, Elvis Aaron Presley would have been celebrating his 73rd birthday today (as far as some people are concerned, of course, he's out there right now munching on a slice of birthday cake). But the 8th January also belongs to one of music's living legends—David Robert Jones, better known as David Bowie, who today celebrates his 61st birthday.

As the mathematically-minded among you may already have calculated, this means Bowie is only 12 years younger than Elvis; something most of us in the office were more than a little astonished to discover. It just goes to show how effective Bowie's reinventions have been over the years. Compare his first single, "Liza Jane" (which he brought out with the King Bees in 1964) with Elvis's first single, "That's All Right" (which appeared exactly a decade earlier), and you'll hear two very similar blues/beat sounds. But compare Elvis's last single, "Way Down" (released just two weeks before his death, in 1977) with Bowie's seminal 1977 "Heroes" and you'll hear two different musical worlds—one wallowing in the past, one showing us what the future could sound like. The king is dead: long live the duke.