The Police have announced a reunion world tour predicted to gross £150 million for the band members after they opened the Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are the Police and we are back,” cried Sting, as he led Andy Summers, the guitarist, and Stewart Copeland, the drummer, into the hit song Roxanne, 20 years after the trio split.

The band called a press conference yesterday to announce a world tour, reviving one of Britain’s leading rock exports. The Police quit the music scene at their mid-1980s peak, after selling 50 million records.

The American music industry’s premier event was dominated by homegrown stars. The Dixie Chicks, lambasted for publicly expressing their opposition to the Iraq war, swept the board, taking five awards.

The country trio endured death threats, public CD burnings and radio boycotts after the lead singer, Natalie Maines, declared at a concert in London in 2003 that she was “ashamed” that President Bush came from her home state of Texas. They took five awards, including Best Record and Best Song for their unrepentant anthem, Not Ready to Make Nice. Emily Robison said after receiving the Best Country Album award: “We wouldn’t have done this album without everything we went through, so we have no regrets.”

British stars, including James Blunt, who had received five nominations, were shunned as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mary J. Blige and Gnarls Barkley took the top awards.

However, Peter Frampton, the British rock guitarist, who was a million-seller in the 1970s, won his first Grammy for an album of instrumental music. Bryn Terfel, the world’s biggest-selling opera singer, took a classical crossover prize for Simple Gifts, an album of collaborations with performers including Aled Jones and the guitarist John Williams.

Stuart Price, Madonna’s Reading-based producer, won an award for his remix of Coldplay’s Talk, created under his pseudonym Jacques Lu Cont.

Twenty million viewers tuned in to the Grammies, marking its biggest US audience in three years. The former American Idol champion Carrie Underwood took to the stage after the Police. The hit series was mimicked in an amateur contest where the winner performed with Justin Timberlake.

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