Slice of Heaven: The story of Aotearoa's unofficial anthem

Slice of Heaven was written for a soundtrack but it spent eight weeks at number one in the New Zealand charts and four weeks at number one in Australia.

Dave Dobbyn wrote the song for New Zealand's first ever animated feature film Footrot Flats A Dog's Tale based on the popular comic strip by Murray Ball.

It was a song made in two days, rejected by radio and unseen on TV.

This is the story of how Slice of Heaven was a most unlikely underdog.

How the song got made

It all started with the Footrot Flats cartoon, which Audioculture's Chris Burke said was incredibly well loved.

"It was the perfect mix of people, you had Murray Ball, Tom Scott writing the script and Dave Dobbyn writing the music."

Film producer John Barnett whose list of credits include Sione's Wedding, Whale Rider, Shortland Street and Outrageous Fortune said at the time making a film of Footrot Flats was a risky proposition.

"The Film Commission were not that keen to support it because there was a view there that an animated film was not a proper film."

So Barnett said they raised the money privately and told everyone it would be a risk. Fay Richwhite and their investors went out and raised a couple of million dollars, he said.

Barnett said Dave Dobbyn was his first choice for writing the soundtrack.

"I felt that we needed a soundtrack that spoke to a younger audience."

In the 1980s Dobbyn was in the successful band DD Smash which had just broken up. 

Dobbyn said after that the Footrot Flats project was his only source of income at the time.

"It was a real relief you know to be able to do something where you're just being creative all day long, sitting in a little room, staring at a tiny little LED screen, making sounds and making loops and trying to find noises that would suit the character."

Dobbyn said prior to that he had "zilch" experience in creating film soundtracks.

But he said he did attend a short part-time course at the Australian Film Institute in Sydney on scoring for film.

"I learnt from that what Bernard Hermann did with instruments in the Vertigo soundtrack - used a lot of trombones, there were some dangerous suspense sounds and all this and so your head goes into that space and then I just got playful with it."

One year into the Footrot Flats project Dobbyn went on a tour of New Zealand with his new band The Stone People.

Chris Burke, who was then editor of music magazine Rip It Up, joined the tour as an embedded reporter and was travelling in the van with Dobbyn who gave him an early demo version of Slice of Heaven.

Burke said he remembers it being "unusual and rootsy".

"Well I can't pretend that I thought it would be a number one hit for eight weeks, it was so raw and the conditions were so up against it - you know the back of the van, the walkman and this is a recording on very primitive computer equipment."

The writing of the song

Dobbyn says a machine called the Emulator II played an integral part in the song.

"It was just fantastic, it was one of the early samplers but it's much sought after these days and you load this disk into and it said 'this will take a while' on a tiny screen and it did take a while for the sounds to you know power up.

"You can output sounds, you can sample sounds onto it, you can combine samples, you can do sequences, you can do everything a work station does except in a really organic way."

Dobbyn said things just sound good on the Emulator II and he had a library of audio sounds from around the world which was perfect for a cartoon.

"So I was just goofing around on that machine whereby you can have a rhythm, build up a rhythm and then you build up a bass line, build up some other things like strings and other noises and stuff - so I was having a ball on that thing."

Slice of Heaven was mostly built up on the Emulator II, but Dobbyn did lay down some guitar licks which he later realised unintentionally sounded very similar to the Rolling Stones song She's So Cold.

"I've always played like Keith [Richards] anyway so maybe it's just a reference to it."

Dobbyn said the phrase 'slice of heaven' seemed to be in the vernacular anyway.

"It's about as superlative a line as a Kiwi could muster in those days."

He was very taken with the male harmonies on Paul Simon's Graceland album and Slice of Heaven also lent itself to a group of male voices.

"And then I thought that Herbs could do the honours and sing some classic Māori harmonies, it was a very attractive notion and they said yes straight away."

Pressure was on

The timeframe for the production of the Footrot Flats film was very tight.

For the music team led by Dobbyn and producer Bruce Lynch that meant recording and mixing Slice of Heaven at Marmalade Studios in Wellington in two and a half days so that a movie trailer would be ready to show in cinemas.

Nigel Stone was Marmalade Studio's head engineer at the time and said he remembers the two of them walking in with an Emulator II and Dave's guitar and that was it.

Stone said on day two, all the music was laid down and they were ready for Herbs to come in.

Stone said it can be a little awkward asking people to contribute something major if they are not the artist involved, plus the musicians didn't know each other very well.

But he said they walked away from Slice of Heaven "with an extraordinarily solid relationship".

Dobbyn said as soon as they started singing he knew that Herbs brought the right sound to the track.

"I think that's the magic of Herbs, it's the magic of a lot of Māori and Pasifika singing is you can't really identify the harmonies because people just find them where ever they want - the corporate effect is fantastic."

The pressured deadline was met and at the end of two and a half days a song and a movie trailer were ready to go.

'Put this on radio and it will go off' - Dobbyn

Dobbyn said he felt very optimistic about Slice of Heaven's chances.

"I said this is the one, you put this on the radio and it will go off, I just knew that it was too hooky to be ignored and that's a really strong feeling when you know you've discovered something that's bigger than you are."

But Dobbyn's manager Roger King said despite the fact they thought the song had huge potential nobody in radio did.

"People in radio wouldn't play it and New Zealand radio, the popular stations in New Zealand at the time wouldn't play the song, almost until it was number one on their charts."

King said the first radio station to call him and say "this is a massive song" was in Madison Wisconsin in the United States.

"Someone rang and it was a DJ from a radio station in Madison Wisconsin and he said are you aware that Slice of Heaven is the number one song in Madison right now and it's never been released.

"Somebody brought it back from Sydney and handed it to the radio station and they've just been playing it endlessly."

Dobbyn said trying to get past New Zealand radio programmers in the mid-1980s was extremely hard work as there was a misconception that New Zealand music was not good enough.

A lasting legacy

Dobbyn's manager Roger King puts the song's success down to the fact that "it's a feel good song ... it's an uplifting song."

Burke said its hook lines mean that everyone can sing along.

'It's such an outlier it's such an unusual song, you know it's got this very strange rhythm, a mix of pub rock and a bit of reggae, it's got the wooden flute instrument and I think its uniqueness is what made it a hit." 

In 2020 Dobbyn recorded Hine Ruhi, a te reo Māori version of Slice of Heaven with Hana Mereraiha.

Dobbyn said Mereraiha's translation of the song was amazing and "her phrasing fit the music amazingly".

Songs featured in this programme: Slice of Heaven, Hine Ruhi, You Oughta Be in Love, Don't Give Up, OST Footrot Flats: A Dog's Tale (Dave Dobbyn), She's So Cold (Rolling Stones), Sledgehammer (Peter Gabriel), E Papa (Herbs), For Today (Netherworld Dancing Toys), Sweet Lovers (The Holidaymakers), Brass in Pocket (The Pretenders)