The house he had hoped to buy fell through, his wife and four children were still thousands of miles away in London, and his record company was pressuring him for his next album. And British Airways had lost all his luggage, including song books containing years’ worth of carefully crafted lyrics.

Then, just as things might have seemed hopeless, he embarked on a love affair that was to endure for nearly a quarter of a century.

Bayleys — a historic plantation house and 30-acre estate with views across the southeast of the island, rippling fields of sugar cane and, in the distance, the silver-blue shimmer of the Caribbean sea — found a place in Grant’s heart. He bought it without hesitation.

“There’s something special about this place. It has given me very, very great inspiration,” he says, relaxing in a gazebo in the garden.

Now, having decided that it is time to sell up and move on once again, Grant, 57, has put Bayleys on the market for £19m. But there will be memories to take away, as well as an eight-figure cheque. Everything from teaching his youngest daughter to swim in the large square pool, to the day Sting turned up unannounced at the front gate, and the time the Rolling Stones came to stay.

Then there is the music. It was here in Grant’s Blue Wave recording studios located in the coach house, away from the main house, that most of his famous hits were born, including the 1980s chart hits I Don’t Wanna Dance, Electric Avenue and Gimme Hope Jo’anna. It was here, too, that he mentored local artists and spawned a whole new genre of music known as ringbang.

Most important of all, however, is the pride he takes in having preserved and enhanced what is arguably the most culturally important property in the former British colony of Barbados.

Built in 1719 by Joseph Bayley, one of the island’s white plantocracy, the 444-acre estate thrived on slave labour from west Africa. On April 14, 1816 — Easter Sunday — 400 slaves staged an uprising, led by a young man named Bussa. The insurrection rapidly spread to neighbouring parishes, leaving a quarter of the island’s cane crop in flames as the West India Regiment moved to crush it. When the revolt was over, one white man was dead — and about 1,000 blacks.

Despite its failure, the rebellion served as a milestone in the fight for emancipation and, in 1834, slavery was abolished in British colonies.

Grant knew nothing of the history of Bayleys when he bought it for a price he will reveal only as being less than $1m. “They said, ‘Eddy, you don’t know it yet, but you have bought the sanctum sanctorum of Barbados’ culture’,” Grant recalls. “I was amazed.”

“I made a vow at the time to make it beautiful,” he says, proudly. “Here were young people, some not so young, who obviously wanted to live, but chose to die so that others like myself could enjoy a reasonable standard of living — and that’s a marvellous thing.”

Beneath the lofty ficus tree opposite his front door there now stands a monument dedicated to Bussa and those who fought for their freedom at his side. A second is mounted on the wall of the tiny white chapel in the garden.

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