Island Trees High School students in the band Getaway Drive beat out five other bands selected as finalists from more than 70 entries to win the Daily News Battle of the Bands contest.

Together as a band for about two years now, the members met at the high school's talent show.

"We decided we wanted to be in the next talent show and we started playing," explained drummer and Island Trees High School senior Anthony Santanocito.

Self-defined as pop-rock, Santanocito said he can't really compare his band's music to any modern-day band.

"We do all original songs," Santanocito said. "Our guitar players Kyle Zavada and Dave Faulhaber write a lot of the guitar riffs. Mike, our singer, and I write a lot of the lyrics, along with Dave. We work really hard on it."

Getaway Drive is no stranger to the local music scene. Santanocito said they have performed at The Downtown and Crazy Donkey, both in Farmingdale. However a lot of their support comes from within the school itself, as well as the school's Director of Music Peter Gibbons.

"Everyone's been really helpful with their advice," Santanocito said. "Mr. Gibbons has been putting out announcements lately for people to come down to our show."

Gibbons described the band's success as "fantastic." While three of the band members are recent Island Trees High School graduates, all have pursued the district's music program throughout their academic careers.

"All of these guys started in the music program back in fourth grade and have always been in all of our performing groups," Gibbons said. "These guys are really taking off."

Santanocito said the band's guitar player's fathers informed the boys of the Daily News contest.

"We decided to enter and see what happens and about two weeks later we got a phone call saying we were one of the finalists," Santanocito explained.

As the winner, Getaway Drive got to produce a song and video aboard the John Lennon Songwriting Contest Educational Tour Bus, a free pressing of CDs from the company, Disc Makers and a guitar.

"The high school is also receiving a portable keyboard and production suite, as well as top of the line music production software," Gibbons said. "We'll be able to use it then for all of the kids in the high school. We can record performances, burn CDs and DVDs of all of their performances."

The video created by Getaway Drive will now be judged on a national level.

"The music video will be online and people will be voting on it that way," Santanocito added.

As far as the future for Santanocito and his band mates, he said that they want to take it to the next level.

"We want to shop our stuff out to some record labels and see if anyone's interested," Santanocito said.

To view Getaway Drive's video online visit http://media.jlsc.com/schedule/2005/ and click on the Apple Store, SoHo link.