Pop star: Peter Blake

The approach to Peter Blake's studio in west London doesn't exactly stand out. With its well-heeled mums pushing their babies in three-wheeler buggies and street drinkers damning the world between swigs of super-strength lager, it could be any bit of the capital. And here, down one particularly drab side-street, sits an anonymous-looking warehouse with its windows papered up. A slatted wooden door trimmed with spikes is the only thing protecting the bounty within. At first glance, you think you've taken a wrong turn on your quest for a national treasure.

That feeling doesn't last long, though, as Blake pokes his head round the entrance. After an initial hesitant eyeball, the 75-year-old eagerly extends an invitation to enter his magical kingdom and totters over the cobbles of a private mews towards his studio. Today, he sports a white shirt accessorised with Elvis cufflinks (recalling a forgetful groom at a Vegas wedding) and red braces; and of course there's his distinctive ringmaster's goatee. He fusses, unnecessarily: "I've lumped all of my appointments into one, so that I only have to take one day off work."

Blake doesn't need to be this nice. He is, after all, a pioneer of Pop Art. It was he who designed the iconic cover of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band in 1967. He is one of the country's best-known artists, becoming a Royal Academician in 1981, as well as a knight of the realm, in 2002, and has always been popular with the public. What concerns him, he says, is making art as "democratic and accessible as pop music"; seeking an audience beyond the "culturati". With the characters he reproduces, often in collage – wrestlers, say, Robin Hood or Elvis – he is clearly reaching out to the mainstream.

His HQ is a veritable visual treat. It's not so much a workplace, as a museum of antiquities. You name it; he's kept it, so within the complex of rooms in his converted builder's yard you'll find an amazing collection of amassed trinkets. From the moment you glimpse the waxwork of the boxer Sonny Liston at the entrance you realise you've entered a world of vaudevillian heroes and villains; of Albion dandies and the Wild West's lightning guns; of gangsters, bruisers and boxers, of dusty-looking taxidermy rubbing up against vintage circus posters. In the kitchen where we discuss his career, there is a Perspex Eiffel Tower, presidential-style desk-flags and any number of unfinished canvases and art books.

Judging by his surroundings, he is not exactly the struggling artist; so different from two years ago, when he claims he was completely broke.

"I made a couple of big mistakes, I guess, in the early days," he explains. "I was in a show in New York in 1961, and I got really terrible reviews and I made a vow to myself that I would never ever exhibit there, which I stuck to until about five years ago. Career-wise that wasn't a good move. I also said don't ever sell me to Charles Saatchi – because he's not a collector, he's a dealer. And it transpired that he was and is. So I've made a few moral moves that career-wise weren't good ideas." He says the reason for his new-found (relative) wealth lies in his embracing print production – rattling off copies of his most famous pictures – which can be a lucrative business.

He also recently had another "plus", the right to use the Sgt Pepper cover in a one-off set of prints (although he still does not own the image). He originally earned only £200 for it; but he remains firm friends with Paul McCartney, with whom he is planning to meet for dinner the week we meet. "I've never discussed the controversy with him," Blake continues. "He must know what the situation was because he's pretty savvy but I've never put it to him directly. But we socialise, we talk about photography and art. He paints."

Apart from McCartney, he boasts a huge number of rock-star friends. Over the years, on a Friday-night's roistering through Soho, Blake might have exchanged a rock'n'roll hug with any one of Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller or Pete Townshend. In art, he went out of his way to become friends with the YBA generation – whose own alliance with musicians mirrored his own – when they were still messing around in student bars. Any number of recent graduates of the Royal College of Art, which he attended in the 1950s, still hang out with him. It is an enduring testimony to his personality (and liver) that you might still catch him hollering out a drunken number at The Groucho, or propping up the bar in Soho member's club The Colony Room.

He is a big fan of Damien Hirst's work, particularly his mass-produced spot paintings. "You know the formula, you know what you're going to get and they're beautiful," he says. "So he's invented a means by which he doesn't have to do them, he has a team who do it for him, which I think is great. You can phone up and say I want one with pink and some yellow and can more or less order it. Good luck to him."

It's all very well if your work earns big bucks, but what about those struggling along on a shoe-string? Does he think the arts are well enough funded? "I just don't like any politicians," he continues. "I can't think who would want to do it, though I like some of them a little more than I like others. But I am completely against the Olympic Games. It seems completely pointless having it here. Fine, go and compete in it in Greece; I think it should be in a permanent venue over there. But here it's simply become about commerce. It's going to be a disaster. The money is going to build and build and build. So by definition a lot of that money is being diverted from the arts that shouldn't be."

Blake was born in 1932 in Dartford, Kent. At the age of 14 he attended Gravesend School of Art. "After coming back from being evacuated suddenly it was just offered to me, completely out of the blue." He says he inherited the artist's gene from his parents, an electrician and a dress-maker. "I think both of them, if they had had the opportunity, might well have been artists; if my mother was a youngster now, she would have gone to fashion school. Dad did very beautiful child drawings and I think he would have gone in that direction."

He transferred to the Royal College of Art at a time when Pop Art was coming to prominence. Blake was caught between the twin inspirations of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg soiling canvases in America, and The Independent Group – a multi-disciplinary group of creatives who spearheaded the use of "found objects" in art – based at London's ICA. Here, Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton were making waves; Blake soon began properly to develop his craft. His early work was dominated by two major subjects: fantastic scenes from the world of the circus and naturalistic paintings with autobiographical elements. Motifs included circus characters and children reading comic books; his work paved the way for the English Pop Art movement, which included fellow imagineers David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield.

He got a first from the RCA, graduating in 1956. He soon won a Leverhulme scholarship to pay for a year's travelling through Europe, which hadn't been given to artists before, and went to bullfights and football matches and wrestling bouts, and even travelled with the circus for a couple of weeks. When he returned to Britain in 1957 he taught at his alma mater of Gravesend, and went on to juggle a number of jobs – teaching analytical drawing at Saint Martin's, illustration at Harrow and painting at Walthamstow (where the film-maker Peter Greenaway and the late pop performer Ian Dury were among his charges).

Ten years ago he announced his retirement from full-time work, and entered what he jokingly refers to as his "Late Period". "When I left my two-year residency at the National Gallery in 1996," he explains, "I was 65, so I had this concept I would announce my retirement. I was retiring from jealousy, greed, ambition, avarice; they weren't factors any more. If you think in terms of theatre, my final show at the National Gallery was the big finale. I want to embrace the fact I'm an older painter. And use it as an excuse."

Currently, however, there is no sign of letting up. He has a massive array of work on the boil. A retrospective that appeared last year at Tate Liverpool is currently in Bilbao; he has shows of his prints in Brighton, Devon and Norfolk and hopes soon to be in discussions with the National Gallery over an exhibition of his portraits (he still

describes himself as a "jobbing portrait painter"). He is working on a series of works playing with the alphabet and hopes for a new showcase of his collages. This could marry well with his plans to start up a Pop Art company with his daughter, Rose, to mass produce his images on T-shirts. And the rock'n'roll continues: an album cover for the reformed Blockheads, and a book in which Brian Wilson has written out by hand all the words to the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. Blake is contributing illustrations.

With it, as always, his fingers are kept on the pulse. "I'll come home on the bus and I'll see a kid has come along and tagged every bit of white paint and I think that's really stupid," he says. "But when it's good I very much approve of it. It's nice where we live in Chiswick because it looks down on to a passageway and for years it was a dump and the council have at least cleared it up. And then kids tagged it, though recently we've had kids coming in with stencils. There's one of Stalin. We look down at some art now that is very nice."

Most things, it seems, are fair game in the Peter Blake Curiosity Shop of Artistic Democracy. And a good thing too.

How to buy an exclusive edition of 'Elvis Cross (2008)' by Peter Blake

The Independent Magazine has secured 20 copies of 'Elvis Cross (2008)' by Peter Blake, exclusively for readers at the guaranteed price of £350. The print, produced by Counter Editions to celebrate 50 years of Tate Members, is a screen print in nine colours, with one glaze and diamond dust. Printed by Coriander Studios, London, measuring 72 x 69 cm (28 x 27 in) it is produced in a strictly limited edition of 225, and is signed, numbered and dated by the artist. It is also available framed (£525) in polished aluminium, measuring 77 x 74 cm (30 x 29 in). The edition is offered on a first-come first-served basis from today, Saturday 31 May. To buy 'Elvis Cross (2008)' telephone Counter Editions on 020-7684 8888, Mon-Sat 10am-6pm. Alternatively, you can order by logging on to countereditions.com/independent and following the on-screen instructions. Delivery within the UK and VAT are included in the price. Delivery is by UPS courier and is within 28 days. For full terms and conditions about this offer, see the countereditions.com website, telephone 020-7684 8888 or email info@countereditions.com