Six years after they last played together, 13 since their epic chart duel with Oasis and almost three decades after the band's dominant figures met at school in Essex, Blur are back.

Rock reunions are all the rage these days. From the Police to Take That you could put together a spectacular line-up from the acts who have buried their musical differences to chase faded glory and a bumper payday on the booming live circuit.

But the return of one of the definitive Britpop bands, announced yesterday in the indie music bible NME, was still sufficiently unexpected to induce a collective quiver in fans. The band's official web forum was receiving 60 hits a second at one point yesterday. One contributor wrote: “I WANT TO CRY.” Another put simply: “Tue Dec 09, 2008: a day to be remembered for ever.”

Blur will play several venues next summer, culminating at Hyde Park on July 3 and a rumoured spot as the headline act at the Glastonbury Festival the previous week.

They are the band's first live dates since the guitarist Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn's childhood friend from Stanway Comprehensive School in Colchester, walked out in 2002 amid acrimony.

Blur's last album, Think Tank, was completed without him and the remaining three members then went their separate ways.

Albarn, once an extrovert frontman, became the understated driving force behind a bewildering number of experimental projects, including the supergroup, the Good, the Bad and the Queen, the musical revue Africa Express and the Mandarin opera Monkey: Journey to the West, all in addition to his virtual band Gorillaz.

Alex James, the bassist, lives on a farm in the Cotswolds, makes cheese and writes for newspapers and magazines, while Dave Rowntree, the drummer, runs his own computer animation company and is the Labour Party's prospective candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster constituency at the next general election.

Coxon has made six moderately successful solo studio albums and, after years of minimal communication with Albarn, was the key figure in the reunion.

Albarn told the NME: “I would never, ever have thought of doing this again unless Graham was part of it. It's just not fun otherwise. Ten years ago Graham and I found ourselves very uncomfortable, very oversensitive with each other and it hasn't felt comfortable before now ... it was something that had to be sorted out between Graham and myself. It goes right back to childhood. It feels really comfortable doing this. We feel happy to play those songs together and that's exciting.”

In September they started swapping text messages, which led to a clear-the-air lunch, talks with the rest of the band and, eventually, yesterday's announcement. Alex James said that the plan felt “a bit like putting the A-Team back together”.

Chris Morrison, the band's manager of 16 years, said: “I'm just thrilled to see that Damon and Graham are friends again and hanging out together. They've been friends since childhood and life's too short to fall out with the people that you are closest to. Being in a band is much more stressful than being married. With the pressure, the boredom and the forced intimacy, its amazing that anybody ever stays together.”

The performances will coincide with Blur's 20th anniversary. They were briefly known as Seymour but had become Blur by the time of their first hit, the bouncy There's No Other Way in 1991.

They went on to make seven studio albums, including Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife and Blur and helped to make pop music with a distinctive English sensibility mainstream again after years in thrall to American grunge.

A long-running spat with Oasis propelled them on to the front pages in 1995 with the so-called Battle of Britpop. Released in the same week, Blur's single Country House beat their northern rivals' Roll With It to the top of the charts although Oasis's album comfortably outsold theirs that year.

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