THERE has been a late surge of entries during the past week with 30 bands joining the Local Heroes event, hoping to be propelled on the road to fame.

More than 550 bands have now signed up so far and the top prizes will see the winning bands performing at six leading summer music festivals including Bulldog Bash at Stratford, Summer Sundae at Leicester, Beautiful Days in Devon, Get Loaded in the Park in London and the Somerset Foundation Festival.

Voting has been extended until Sunday to give all bands a chance to achieve festival stardom.

In the first round the top voted band from each region will go to the live national playoff night at the Carling Islington Academy on July 13.

The best of the best go on to their choice of up to six festival performances - and possible national fame.

One of the bands dreaming of stardom are PayCheck, a three-piece band from Northwich featuring Sean McMahon, Keran Mclean and Sam Cush.

They formed in early February 2006, writing and performing all their own material and have played a few small gigs around the local area.

To give them a chance to win this contest, their fans can buy their mp3 track (3 points) or where available their realtone for any phone that plays mp3 files (6 points).

Fans can also cast single votes by dialling or texting their given number. A new way to vote (and test the appeal of the tune in question) is the dial a vote by the minute call line set up for each band.

The longer each caller listens to the track, the more voting points the band gets, with one point for each full minute listened to (cost 50p per minute).

Fans can get a taste of the outstanding quality of many entrants from the 2nd edition free podcast produced by co-sponsor to the event Yamaha Music from http://www.yamahapodcasts.co.uk/localheroes.xml

If you have a data connected phone just go to www.lheroes.com for an always up to date live listing of participating bands and dial in numbers to hear their music. This is produced by Roundpoint.

Or you can sample the entry tracks from all contesting bands for free at http://localheroes.newsquest.co.uk/. Here you can read all about the contest by clicking the Local Heroes link on northwichguardian

.co.uk. Other than connection costs all these services are totally free.