His recordings popularised local songs such as "Johnny Jump Up", "Salonika", "The Boys of Fairhill" and "The Armoured Car".

The band was named after the gate lodge of the Stoker estate in Frankfield, Cork, near Crowley's boyhood home.

[2] The band members drifted apart in the mid -80's but reformed in 2014 for one time to mark the passing of Christy Twomey the previous year.

In 2014 Crowley published a large volume Songs From The Beautiful City: Cork Urban Ballads with musical notation and lyrics and with related anecdotes on the facing page.

Set in the context of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, it is the story of an apprentice musician who falls for a girl revolutionary and portrays the burning of the Marxist bookshop in Cork, an actual event from the seventies.