"There has always seemed something grim to me about Mary McCarthy's dogged insistence on remaining angry for 40 years," the literary critic James Wood wrote recently. By the same token, there has always seemed something unfeasibly heroic about Sarah Lucas's determination, still going full-tilt at the age of 43, to live life at the pitch of a delirious Jimi Hendrix solo - the lewd, endlessly deferred climax of Voodoo Chile, say, when it seems he can never get back from where he's gone.  "I feel so overwhelmingly excited by everything at the minute I can hardly sit still," Lucas says on the phone when we are arranging to meet. To which the only possible reply is: "So what's new?" In her best work, thinking and doing seem to be the same thing, detonating in the same moment. It's why she prefers to work at home, between the washing-up and reading the paper and, probably most profitably, in the heavy hangover hours, when she can make connections between a zinc bucket, a raddled pair of tights and a Fray Bentos bake-in-the-tin steak-and-kidney pie that nobody other than maybe Les Dawson would think to make. Leaving the house to toil in a studio, she says, is "too much like going out to do a job".  For Lucas, the rush-of-blood moment, the sudden movement and making is the object. She can be equally headlong in her day-to-day life. She recently leapt on Damien Hirst in a crowded bar at the Groucho Club in Soho and wrestled him to the carpet. She said she was going to bite his tongue off and put it in his pocket and afterwards Hirst admitted that there was an instant when he thought she might do it.  She has always been a singular person, and the most unabashedly all-balls-out, rock'n'roll of the YBAs. It was Lucas who came up with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida as the title for the show that she did with Hirst and Angus Fairhurst at Tate Britain last year. It came from what Doug Ingle, keyboardist with the psychedelic rockers Iron Butterfly, managed to mumble while wastedly trying to convey to a label executive that the band's 1968 album was going to be called In The Garden of Eden.  Led Zeppelin figure in a couple of her titles. Spam Zeppelin ("resin, acrylic paint, fibreglass, wanking mechanism") is a spin on "spam javelin", rude-girl slang for an erection. The roadie mantra "1 - 123 - 123 - 12 - 12" is the title of one of her still bruisingly original early pieces, which consists of a pair of cherry-red Dr Martens with a razor blade inserted lethally in each toe.  "A bloke for the 90s" is how Hirst once described her, an allusion to the gender ambiguity that she simultaneously played up and interrogated in a series of now very well-known photographic self-portraits which showed her in heavy boots and jeans, fag dangling, legs splayed, looking truculent and brazen for the camera.  Gratifyingly for her, there was a period a few years ago when David Bowie, the great soaker-upper, appeared in magazines and videos looking like a Lucas doppelganger, and he was emulated by what at the time seemed like legions of models and members of boy bands. Meanwhile, for a show in Berlin in 2002, Lucas revealed that one of her earliest influences on the gender-bender front - or ambisexual "caper", as she herself would say - was, not entirely predictably, the 1970s Arsenal legend, Charlie George.  She painted portraits of Charlie (the drug double-entendre was purely intentional) on newsprint and on garish pizza flyers that had been pushed through her door, and they could have been portraits of her young self in a red Gunners shirt: same lank, centre-parted hair; same "standstill swagger".  A more abstract rendition of Charlie in the same show came in the form of a porcelain toilet bowl, painted red outside and in, apart from a collar of white, and suspended from the ceiling by a rope. Dangling next to the toilet was another bathroom fitting: a bidet that had been given a coat of matt black and wired up with a tiny, flickering, urine-coloured bulb. This was titled Susan Farge, the name of Charlie George's wife. Three walls of an adjoining gallery were lined with Duchamp-style urinals, each painted in team colours and carrying a facsimile autograph of a player of the Charlie George era.  As is nearly always the case with Lucas, she was working on several levels here. One was autobiographical: she grew up in Islington in north London, where she still lives, and Charlie George was a friend of her brother's; they lived on the same estate. "It's a local thing," she says. "Local to me. His wife lived two doors from me and he lived, like, three blocks away. It was a big moment when he drove up and parked outside his father-in-law's house in a Jaguar. He was the first, I suppose, 'famous' person I knew. But also football was local in those days. He went to the Holloway school where a lot of the Arsenal football team then would have come from, selected from the schoolboys. I've always lived within the sound of the Arsenal crowd, more or less all my life. One of the things that interests me about that is just how different all that stuff is now. 'Local' is hardly there."  The Charlie George installation was only the most recent example of Lucas's fascination with the social spaces that men carve out and aggressively make their own. Snooker halls, nicotined sheds, changing rooms, truckers' cabins, public bars and dodgy urinals keep on turning up in her work; territories from which women tend to be excluded except as the objects of casual put-downs, dirty jokes, or as pin-ups on the salted-peanut card hanging next to the pork scratchings behind the bar.  Lucas read all the standard feminist texts as a student (Andrea Dworkin later used one of her sculptures, Bitch, for the cover of a book) and then, believing they could be restricting, or at least overly prescriptive for an artist, abandoned them. "I've decided I don't want to be the individual who is harping on continuously about a particular issue," she announced more than a decade ago. "I know someone's got to do that job. I just don't want it to be me."  Recent titles, such as What a Bloke! (we all went out with him sometime) and Geezer, may be ironic but, then again, maybe not. It is on the swampy ground of ambivalence that Lucas has sunk the foundations of her work. "I quite like insinuating myself into blokiness, definitely," she says. "I do love it. I love all the banter. That's why I would say something spurious, like 'I'm a better bloke than most blokes'. But it adds so much to the work I do that I'm a woman doing it. And that fascinates me, why it should be so much more powerful because I'm gender-bending, in a way. But it is."  Of all the unpredictable twists and turns that kept the YBA saga bobbing high on the media agenda for the best part of a decade, one of the least explicable was Lucas's decision - at the height of her notoriety, when her pieces were starting to go for six figures at auction - to become a barmaid. Well, not a barmaid exactly, and it was only for one day a week. But around 1998 she decided to work shifts at the Colony Room in Soho, which was going through difficult times making the transition from being the home of Francis Bacon and the old-school bohemian piss-heads of the School of London to accommodating Hirst and Lucas and their lairy, loved-up pals.  Why was she doing it? It was a question that many people kept asking. Was it a grunge enactment of Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere? Or a literalisation of John Berger's theory of female objectification which, at the time of its publication in 1972 ("Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at"), had hinged on women's historical lack of real-world power or independence? Ask her over the drink she was busy serving and she'd give enigmatic answers such as, "I know it's not proper rhyming slang or anything, but I always think of half a lager as a Mick Jagger," or talk about her work as an artist being in the tradition of British slapstick comedians like Benny Hill or the Carry On crew.  I have a strong image of her around this time, backstage in the tiny musicians' bar at Ronnie Scott's Club in Frith Street. Ian Dury, then dying of cancer, had just performed a set for a TV documentary. Lucas was a fan: in her cups, she often gives sing-along renditions of Billericay Dickie and What a Waste, belting it out like some androgyne Marie Lloyd or Gertie Gertana. She loved Dury; his work clearly echoed her own obsession with punning, tabloidised reality. But until the painter Peter Blake brought them together backstage that day, Lucas and Dury had never been introduced. She was touchingly shy and uncharacteristically abashed. She told him about how she used to serve him tea in the days when she was working at a kiosk in Regent's Park but never let on she knew who he was. After a very few minutes, she said she had to go; she had to "be back at work".  Dury no doubt thought she meant back in the studio or at her gallery, rather than around the corner pouring drinks for the halitoxic members of the Colony Club. "It was one of those times," she says now, "and they come round on a kind of loop for me, of not wanting to be pushing what I'm doing; of wanting a bit of breathing space. For years and years I did work in bars, and it didn't make me feel in a lowly position. It gave me quite a strong sense of myself, in fact. I've never believed in those notions that dignity lives in status or in how much money you've got. It's good to remind yourself. And it seemed to work out all right. I also thought I might drink a bit less if I was that side of the bar," she adds, "but I didn't."  Lucas is occasionally snapped at A-list events and gallery openings, but she is not part of the movable feast of paparazzi targets in the way that contemporaries such as Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin, for instance, are. She seems to have an antipathy to modern celebrity culture and doesn't appear to be media-needy in the current way. One of the reasons she gives for why she has stopped making the photographic self-portraits in recent years is that she started to suspect they might just be feeding the world-wide lust for celebrity and iconomania, rather than commenting drily on it.  She spends a lot of time at a house near Aldeburgh in Suffolk these days that she co-owns with her dealer Sadie Coles. It used to be the home of Benjamin Britten, who composed his music in a shed in the garden, and this has been her introduction to Britten, Purcell, Vaughan Williams and the English song tradition.  The countertenor Alfred Deller plays in the background all the time we are speaking, and provides the soundtrack to the video clips and pictures she brings up on her computer screen. They were taken at a dance performance she was involved in at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, where the survey show of her work that is about to arrive at Tate Liverpool was on. It featured her partner Olivier Garbay in a chiffon sheath dress and red high-heeled shoes dancing to moves that had been choreographed by their close friend Michael Clark, and incorporated the rough building-site gestures that she has hijacked and recast as the language of her work: the finger; two fingers; the sign of one forearm jacked up under the other that means "up yours".  God is Dad, the title piece of her recent show at the Barbara Gladstone gallery in New York, featured a globe-shaped bulb glowing through the crotch of a pair of tights. The review of God is Dad in the New York Times concluded that it was all about incest. This is news to Lucas, but she remains unfazed: "People are always suspecting me of being abused. Some people. Journalists. Not everyone. But it does come up that people think there's something about me that suggests I have a very dark past. And that's why I'm sexually twisted, or something. That's what they're reading from the work."  Hirst has never made any secret of the fact that Lucas is the artist among his contemporaries that he most admires. "Sarah's out there strapped to the mast like Turner in the storm, making excellent pieces over and over again," he said five years ago. More recently he has put his money where his mouth was by buying back all her outstanding early work from Charles Saatchi.  No Limits!, the title of a piece she made in 1999, always seems to have summarised her world-view. "I don't want to be scared of anything," Lucas once told me. "I hate excuses. Loathe excuses. I don't want to make them, I don't want to listen to them, I don't want to live one." And there is the sense that, maybe alone among the generation of artists she came up with, she is the one left still living the life.  "I sometimes wonder how long I've got," she says. "I feel all right, but I'm still smoking like a trouper, I still drink like billyo. Not a great deal has changed in that department. I don't take as many drugs as I used to, but I still do. I haven't got to that point of giving anything up, even though the balance shifts a bit . . . I'm not complaining, it just makes you wonder, doesn't it? Because it's completely random how much that stuff affects you and how much it doesn't. It's something you can't know in advance. Everybody, to a certain extent, will be a victim of what their life has been" ·  Win a signed copy of today's g2  Sarah Lucas will be signing 25 copies of today's special edition. If you would like one, please send your name and address on a postcard to Sarah Lucas special issue, g2, The Guardian, 119, Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER.The first 25 picked out on Friday will be sent a copy.
Ever since she reinvented sculpture with her self-portrait with fried eggs, Sarah Lucas has been the most rock'n'roll of the YBAs. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she's still living the life - and still producing extraordinary art. As Tate Liverpool gears up for a major retrospective of her work, she gives an exclusive interview to Gordon Burn.