They put Poi E, that anthem of modern Maori pride by Patea Maori Club, in the runner-up slot and then, at number three? Dobbyn again, with that perpetually- played but still-loved ballad Loyal.
"Well, that's fantastic!" fizzes the owlish singer on hearing of Slice of Heaven's triumph. "It's a compliment and I'll take it as such that people are still celebrating with that song."
Then as quickly he has accepted the honour, Dobbyn bats it away. "Anthems get chosen, they don't get written," he says. "I mean, why Old Man River? Why does Slice of Heaven get sung at rugby games? Probably because there are no words and you can still sing 'da da da'. It's probably the same thing with 'Ya Ya Ya' (from Bliss, the ode to alcohol by Dobbyn's 70s and 80s band Th'Dudes) - it's bizarre what triggers a crowd to behave in a celebratory way."
The modesty continues as Dobbyn credits his listeners for the emotion that hangs in the air when his music is played.
"It's like a rumour you pass over the fence. It starts out as a pretty good story told by one person to another and ends up a totally different thing that has multiple stories. I never thought about it too much when I was writing them. I just wanted to express something at the time."
But what is it about Dobbyn's songs that make us nostalgic? Why have they, and the rest of the tracks that shone in our poll, become a part of our national identity while other chart and critical hits have slipped gently into the past?
A Brit by birth, Dr Robert Burns might seem an unlikely authority on our musical proclivities but the Otago university senior lecturer is an expert on musicology, ethnomusicology and nationalism in music, and he has us pegged.
"Dobbyn writes lyrics that strike home to the Kiwi heart. It's nationalism - nationalism at the nice end rather than the bad end of the spectrum," he says.
Indeed, Loyal evokes the most Kiwi of concepts - mateship. Slice of Heaven describes our country as we like to think of it.
As for Welcome Home, which got an honorary mention from dozens of survey respondents? It's all there in the title.
Scan the other songs that succeeded and you find lyrically or otherwise they are just as obviously Kiwi.
Accents in How Bizarre (No 7) and Business Time (No 10) are unmistakable. Poi E (No 2) and Pokarekare Ana (No 4) are sung in Te Reo; Sailing Away (No 6) evokes our connection with the sea.
What of the less overtly Kiwi songs in the top 10 - Don't Dream It's Over (No 4) and Royals (No 7) ? Their sound is international enough that Crowded House and Lorde cracked the American market. The latter is up for a clutch of Grammys tomorrow.
Do we connect with those tunes more than foreign hits because we feel proud of the artists?
"It's inevitable," says Burns. "It's zeitgeist. It's a time and a place, a memory."
Plenty of musicians have made it on foreign soil and plenty of Kiwi music sounds, well, Kiwi. Why haven't they all become iconic? "They have to be accessible," says Burns. "Dobbyn writes anthemic music. The songs are awfully simple to the extent that they're highly memorable. He uses simple chord sequences and I don't mean that critically."
Simple and nationalistic. What would Dobbyn make of this? Probably very little. He gently refuses to own reactions to his songs.
"It's the same as if I was a painter," he says. "If I move people a certain way I don't own the movement of that person. You can't claim that it came out of you. It came out of the song - the song stands on its own.
As Bob Dylan once said 'a song is anything that can stand by itself'. You'd rather people remember the song than you."
The top ten
1. Slice of Heaven, Dave Dobbyn and Herbs
2. Poi E, Dalvanius and the Patea Maori Club
3. Loyal, Dave Dobbyn
4. Pokarekare Ana, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa
5. Don't Dream It's Over, Crowded House
6. Sailing Away, Ensemble
7. How Bizarre, OMC
8. Royals, Lorde
9. Wandering Eye, Fat Freddy's Drop
10. Business Time, Flight of the Conchords
- Source: Nielsen polled 4,193 APN readers, aged 18+.
