John Berkmortel

John Berkmortel began guitar lessons at nine years old. His teacher was Kathryn Sharpe, nineteen at the time, who told him he had ability and kept on telling him so. Almost four decades later that encouragement would come back around in the most public way imaginable, but in the meantime it did what good teaching does. It gave a Southwestern Ontario kid the lifelong habit of writing songs.

By 1983 Berkmortel was writing his own material. “Your Love for Me,” the earliest song he would eventually gather onto the retrospective collection One Day at a Time, dates from that year. “You’re the One” followed in 1986, and 1987 alone produced four more: “25 Years Have Just Gone By,” “A Little Forgiveness,” “Motor Runs Dry” and “Childhood Recollections.” The songs accumulated alongside the rest of his working life. He wrote them the way other people keep journals.

That same decade brought him into partnership with Bill Lamont. The two had gone to the same high school in Strathroy, and as Gilded Cage they built a studio project. They wrote, they recorded properly, they serviced radio and they went after industry exposure, all while Berkmortel kept his day job.

Gilded Cage’s first single, “Last Time” backed with “A Feeling I Can’t Hide,” came out on London’s Auto Records in 1987 as AUTO 003. Peter Brennan produced it, Joe Vaughan engineered at EMAC Studios in London and Lacquer Channel in Toronto handled the mastering. Berkmortel sang lead and backing vocals and played bass and guitar, with Lamont on guitar and keyboards. Jeff Stevens, Jane Colligan, Peter Brennan and Steve Malison filled out the sessions. The record won CFPL-FM’s On Track songwriting competition and took several nights of CKSL’s Battle of the Bands, and local press credits the duo with On Track wins across both 1986 and 1987. Roughly a thousand copies moved through Auto Records and area retailers.

The 1988 follow-up, “Tara” backed with “Rain” on Auto 005, went considerably further. It picked up airplay at more than fifty stations across Canada, and the pair were named CKSL Battle of the Bands champions. A video for “Tara,” shot by Ryerson students Tim Martin and Jeff Wickstead, placed second in the music video category at CBC Telefest ’89 and went on to air on YTV and CBC’s Video Hits. Both singles drew PRO Canada and Music Scene coverage.

Two years of that was enough. Berkmortel and Lamont stepped away from Gilded Cage as the decade closed, and Berkmortel went back to writing on his own terms. “The Once Upon a Time” dates from 1988, “Rock ’n Roll Mountie” from 1989, “A Winter’s Morning” from 1990 and “Gift of Sight” from 1993. A Gilded Cage recording called “Gotten Over You” carries a 1993 date as well, so whatever ended in 1989 was the public phase of the band and not the friendship behind it.

In 2005, with a backlog of songs stretching back twenty years, Berkmortel set about recording them properly. Somewhere in that process he went looking for Kathryn Sharpe to thank her. He found that she had spent her career in education and was deeply involved with Peaceful Schools International, and that she had a phrase she used with students: do the right thing because it is the right thing to do. Berkmortel wrote it into a song.

“The Right Thing to Do” was finished in 2006 and given to Peaceful Schools International. Berkmortel sang and played guitar and bass, Judy Von sang backing vocals, Kathy Gillard played piano and clarinet, and Doug Gillard and Ross Teeple played drums. Glen Teeple recorded it at The Music Room in Arkona.

The song then did something home recordings almost never do. Hetty van Gurp’s 2007 book Creating Caring Schools: Peace-promoting activities for all seasons built a section around it, printing the song and its sheet music across pages 70 to 82 with a CD tucked inside the back cover, and recommending it to teachers for assemblies through the school year. Van Gurp thanked Berkmortel by name for writing it. A guitar teacher had started him at nine, and his thank-you to her ended up as classroom material.

One Day at a Time gathers twelve songs written between 1983 and 2006, and its credits read like a map of the players Berkmortel worked with over those years. Randy Lawson engineered and programmed drums across much of the collection, Glen Teeple recorded several tracks, Bill Lamont returned on keyboards, Christine Grimminck added guitar, vocals and flute, Steve Malison played saxophone, Tyler Viaene played keyboards, and Tim Martin, the same Tim Martin who shot the “Tara” video, played snare and percussion. Ben Berkmortel sings on “A Winter’s Morning.” Glen Teeple and Berkmortel remastered the album at The Music Room.

He never stopped playing. Berkmortel has sung in choirs and worked in bands including Goldhawk and, more recently, Just Like That, and he still turns up on stage with Bill Lamont from time to time. In August 2026 he played Sundays at the Station in Glencoe alongside his son Luke, guitar and piano and family harmonies, carrying a musical life that started with childhood guitar lessons into a second generation.

-Robert Williston