 Michael George Haynes was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 3 March 1957, the only child of Caroline Smith, a housewife, and Lloyd Haynes, a painter and decorator who worked for the beverage company Desnoes & Geddes (Lloyd fathered 13 other children).Educated at Greenwich Farm High School, Kingston, he lived nearby with his paternal grandmother Gladys, a market trader.The impoverished Greenwich Farm district had long been a hotbed of musical activity, and during the late 1970s Michael Haynes began singing on local sound systems.