Roger Daltrey: vocal
Robbie McIntosh: rhythm guitar, lead guitar
Nick Glennie-Smith: organ
Alan Shacklock: tambourine
John Siegler: bass
Mark Brzezicki: drums
Backing vocals: Annie McCaig, John Payne, Mark Williamson

Produced by Alan Shacklock. Recorded by Will Gosling at RAK Studios, London. Mixed by Mark Wallis and Alan Shacklock at Odyssey Studios, London.

Also recorded by Bryan Adams

"Rebel" was written specially for Roger Daltrey during our "topical" lyric-writing phase when Bryan and I were trying our hardest not to write boy-girl lrics!

Bryan would later record his own version of the song.

Back then (1984-85) Bryan was dating Vicki Russell, daughter of the famous British film director Ken Russell. Years earlier, as a child, Vicki had appeared in the film version of The Who's "Tommy", directed by her father and featuring Roger Daltrey in the lead role.

It was Vicki who arranged for Bryan to meet Roger.

During a dinner in London one night, Roger mentioned he was working on a solo album. Bryan jumped at the opportunity and offered to write a song for the project. When Bryan arrived back to Canada, we got straight to work.

"Rebel" is about small-town England, as best we could imagine it if, for example, Roger had worked in a shop or a factory and not become famous (for example, Ozzy Osbourne was a plumber before he was a singer).

It's also about finding the courage to change ... to leave behind all that's familiar.

In "The Isles", a history of Britain and Ireland by author Norman Davies, there's a story about a 9,000-year-old skeleton un-earthed near the town of Cheddar. DNA was extracted and was found to match that of Adrian Targett, a local school teacher whose family had a long history in the area.

My point being: in England, even today, there are people who are born and die in the same village, or leave and come back.

Here's a bio from the allmovie.com website.

British director Ken Russell started out training for a naval career, but after wartime RAF and merchant navy service he switched goals and went into ballet. Supplementing his dancing income as an actor and still photographer, Russell put together a handful of amateur films in the 50s before being hired as a staff director by the BBC. Russell made a name for himself (albeit a name not always spoken in reverence) during the first half of the '60s by directing a series of iconoclastic TV dramatizations of the lives of famous composers and dancers. And if he felt that the facts were getting in the way of his story, he'd make up his own — frequently bordering on the libelous. If he had any respect for the famous persons whose lives he probed, it was secondary to his fascination with revealing all warts and open wounds.

A film director since 1963, Russell burst into the international consciousness with 1969's Women in Love, a hothouse version of the D.H. Lawrence novel. No director who staged a scene in a mainstream movie in which two men wrestled in the nude could escape notice, and thus Russell became more of a "star" than his actors. While some viewers had their sensibilities shaken by Women in Love, others had their sensibilities run through the blender with Russell's next film, The Music Lovers. Predicated on the notion that Peter Tchaikovsky and his wife were, respectively, a homosexual and nymphomaniac, the film's much discussed "highlight" is a scene in which Nina Tchaikovsky (Glenda Jackson) allows the inmates in the cellar of an insane asylum to reach up and play with her privates. But this was kid's stuff compared to Russell's The Devils (1971), an ultraviolent and perversely anachronistic adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. Russell returned to his musical theater roots with The Boy Friend (1971), a bloated version of Sandy Wilson's intimate 1920s pastiche, and then went back to biography with the insanely inaccurate Lisztomania (1974) and Valentino (1975). The latter film not only suggested that Rudolph Valentino (Rudolf Nureyev) performed totally nude in his silent films, but also offered up the spectacle of Huntz Hall as producer Jesse Lasky. At this point, even some of the most devoted fans of Russell's outrageous (but undeniably brilliant) visual sense were fed up with his shock-for-shock's-sake approach and his all-consuming narcissism. As outrageousness in filmmaking became the industry norm in the '80s, Russell's reputation began to fade. He was back in his old form with 1991's Whore, which conveyed several times over that life on the streets is hell — then for good measure, said it a few more times. Backed by a childishly slavering ad campaign, Whore brought Russell into the spotlight again. — Hal Erickson