I was watching TV and listening to music before I ever went into an art gallery, and that's where the whole thing came from." Wilson agrees: "He wants his art to have a very direct visceral impact on the viewer. It's a sort of populism." This populism - "What the hell's wrong with sensational?" as Hirst puts it - is precisely what has made some middle-class gallery-goers uneasy about his work, while catching the attention of many more people who never normally look at art.Hirst's mother, Mary Brennan, works in a Citizens' Advice Bureau in Leeds, and is particularly keen on an installation he made by pickling a shoal of different fish in two medicine cabinets, one half chasing the other. "That's my life - we all swim in the same direction and there are no openings," she says.She drew and painted at school herself, then gave it up - her terraced life did not encourage such pursuits. Damien was born in 1965; within a few years he was following the path she couldn't, painting album covers on his friends' leather jackets and making collages. "I used to show them to my Mum's friends," says Hirst, whose father, a second-hand car salesman, walked out when he was 12. "They used to say, 'When you can draw something what looks like it's supposed to be, then come and talk to me'."He never really did: "If you give me already organised elements I can arrange them, but if you give me nothing ...

I can't decide what to put there." Instead he spent hours during his foundation course in Leeds staring at an aquarium and a stuffed tiger in the city's natural history museum. "I wanted to get that kind of reality in art," he says, wide-eyed. "It gives you a real kind of emotional feeling, thinking, 'This thing was actually walking around'." (Hirst says he regretted having his shark caught; he has got his animals from slaughterhouses since, not killed to order.)The idea of drawing directly on the world stayed with him, despite being rejected from Central St Martin's art college, and having to work on a building site in Essex for two years. There he also learnt about populism: "I was with this guy who was a plasterer, and at lunchtime he was eating a stuffed heart .. I was thinking, 'I'm not like these guys. I'm an artist.' And I saw a bee come over to some flowers and get all the pollen out. I was looking and thinking, 'How does it do that?' And then the guy who was eating the stuffed heart said, 'How does that bee do that?' "By now Hirst has allowed the interview to over-run.

He has let slip the impression that he actually loves his work. About his controversial Dead Couple Fucking Twice he enthuses, "The colours are fantastic. You get greens, purples, yellows - it's in Day-Glo colours when it starts to fall apart." The sheer output from his Brixton studio - a crumbling warehouse playground of formaldehyde containers, gas bottles, and paint-spattered plastic sheets - undermines the lazy pose he tried earlier. Besides his animals, he has produced 70 spot paintings, a dozen medicine-cabinet pieces, and a range of installations from the sunny (a suspended beachball in And Still Pursuing Impossible Desires) to the ominous (an imprisoned desk and chair called The Acquired Inability to Escape). "There's no world like the art world," he says, "where you can have as much fun."Recently Hirst bought a farmhouse near the north Devon coast - appropriately for the director of Blur's "Country House" video - so Maia can go surfing and he can avoid London He has acquired a Range Rover Mum has been to stay for a fortnight.

"Life is just so rich it's ridiculous," says Hirst.He thinks Connor is "better than anything I've ever made". So great, in fact, that the baby has inspired a new work, called Lamby Love Snoodle. It features some clothes from Mothercare, a pram, and a baby with a mobile phone, talking to a skull.! Turner Prize Shortlist: Tate, SW1 (0171 887 8000); the prizewinner will be announced on 28 Nov.. LIKE GIANTS holding hands, electricity pylons have marched across the British landscape for 60 years. They have captured the imagination of poets, and incurred the wrath of countrymen and conservationists Today they are on their way out.