Peter Blake interview: 'The liquid in my brain was running out of my nose'

But then again, this show – a retrospective of his drawings – is a chance to revisit long-forgotten encounters. Until he began preparing for it two years ago, he hadn’t seen most of the work in it for decades. “Talking it through is like talking to my old self,” he says, at one point. “How long have you got? Because I do go on for ever.”

Blake, who is 86, has never had a show devoted exclusively to his drawings before, which seems incredible, as they have always been central to his practice. Indeed, his mapping pens and a troop of sharp, hard pencils (he favours a 7H) are always about his rotund, braces-clad person.

“P. Blake” reads the little signature at the bottom of one such drawing in the show, the hand childish and reticent. Understandable, as the artist was only 13 at the time. The drawing – of a church on a lane, copied from a 1945 travel guide – is meticulous. This is where Blake’s story begins: in post-war Kent, when a shy schoolboy made “pathologically nervous” by twice being evacuated, realises that he has a talent.

Four years on, and his signature starts to look more elastic: “Peter Blake”, it asserts, in neat, embroidery-like loops, on the drawings he made at Gravesend Technical College and later, the Gravesend School of Art, because he knows who he is now. His path in life has been cinched.

We know Blake best for his brightly coloured collages, his wrestlers and circus performers, his record sleeves for the Beatles and his artworks featuring the Beach Boys. He famously said that he wanted people to have the same emotional experience in front of his painting of Elvis as they would in front of the King himself, and his appropriation of popular culture and his working class roots (“while everyone else was at the Albert Hall, I’d be at Charlton Athletic or the speedway”) were a brilliant means of bucking the smug sentimentalism then suffocating British art.

The drawings are a sort of backstage view to that pizzazz. It’s the same life, the same people and places, but with added sentiment, and I mean that as a good thing – informal sketches of ashtrays and breakfast cereals, Cornish holidays and his daughter’s socks, brief notations of inconsequential moments. Here he is at the Royal College of Art in the Fifties, sketching the wrestler Dr Death on the Edgware Road. Here he is in the Seventies, on tour with Ian Dury, and here, in the early Sixties, on a trip to California, where he drove around in a gold Corvette Stingray convertible that had been lent to him by his father-in-law, the Oscar-winning art director Ted Haworth.

During that trip, Haworth arranged for Blake to sketch the props from the film Cleopatra at Universal Studios. Blake sat, in fact, on the very day bed on which Elizabeth Taylor had reclined, “quite a thrill,” he admits, though the euphoria quickly vanished when he left the backlot that evening to find that Kennedy had been assassinated, and that people were crying on the street. “I’d entered that storeroom from one world and come out to find another.”

He found California, “fantastic. I was smitten,” and made drawings everywhere he went, including the giant sign for a doughnut drive-in outlet, and a list of some of Baskin Robbins’ famous 31 flavours. “I look at that now,” says Blake, “and it anticipates so many artists who later worked with lettering – Christopher Wool, Richard Prince. And I did it in ‘63.”

This is a familiar bone of contention for Blake: that several of his early Pop Art experiments actually predated the work of artists who later got the credit for inventing them: he did boxes and packaging before Andy Warhol, flags before Jasper Johns and comics before Roy Lichtenstein. “I felt he didn’t like comics at all. He got sucked in because his dealer wanted him to do it. He was a disappointment and I declined to meet him when the opportunity came up.”

Warhol he met “eight times. And he took me on a tour of his Factory. But we never really got on because we were both so reticent.” He also met Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whom he admires greatly, but never Joseph Cornell, which he deeply regrets. “In terms of timing I could have done, but it just never happened.” Because Cornell adored Europe, but never actually visited, Blake is working on a series of collages called Joseph Cornell’s Holiday, in which he imagines bringing the American artist to Europe – on a bus.

Clearly, Blake has half an eye out for his fellow man. It’s the reason for his unexpected camaraderie with the YBAs, whom he met at the opening of a Gavin Turk exhibition, when Turk and his cohort - Emin, Lucas, Gavin Hume and Damien Hirst – were just becoming famous, in the early Nineties. “I remembered,” says Blake, “that when I had been a student, certain older artists were friendly and others definitely weren’t, and I thought how nice it was when someone was. Johnny Minton, he was a good mentor, and he would take us drinking. So I went that way rather than the other way.”

Actually, he admires them, too. “I think Damien’s a really good artist. He’ll certainly last. He’s very like Hockney, because he keeps it changing and moving.” Emin is another he’s willing to bet on, although they recently fell out – “she’s put herself apart from a lot of people, become very grand”. As for the rest of the group: “Well, they’ve gone already, haven’t they?”

Does he still have faith in the art world, or does it need to change? “In a way, I’m separate from it now. I’m older than it, beyond it,” says Blake, who was elected to the Royal Academy in 1981, and knighted in 2002. I see his point. “In terms of my career, I’m in my late period.”

Alongside the drawings are Blake’s recent watercolours, portraits that he completed earlier this year of imaginary guests at a children’s party. They’re meant to contain an undertone of apprehension or menace, and some of the faces are half blurred out. But by god, they’re exquisite, the summation, perhaps of all the decades of draughtsmanship on display in the rooms of drawings.

Here, too, is his portrait of the Queen, who, unlike the Duchess of Sussex, he has all the time in the world for. “My grandmother was a royalist, she used to take me to all the victory parades and I went to Margaret and Tony’s wedding, so I like the idea of royalty.” In the Sixties, he came very close to a royal commission. Roy Strong recommended him, “but in the end she chose Annigoni. I think she took one look at what I was doing and was a bit frightened I’d do her all Pop, with badges. But I wouldn’t have. I’m very fond of her.”

Peter Blake: A Life in Drawings and Watercolours is at Waddington Custot, London W1, until Sept 4 (waddingtoncustot.com)