Even as Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie continues to make music (including his brand new solo album Lower Reaches), I’ve never stopped wishing that a band reunion might come to pass someday.

Apparently, the waiting will not last a lifetime — it will come to an end in January of 2014.

Over the weekend, I saw the following tweet from @delamitrinews, an account which had recently followed me, while beginning to favorite all of my Del Amitri-related tweets from over the past few years:

Guess Who Is Back? #delamitri Please RT!

Of course, I had to tweet back:

@delamitrinews I would love for this to be true!

A visit to their official Facebook page (I forgot they had one!) revealed a message which made things even more clear:

Well now. Get a load of this…
It looks like the three Glasgow boys (Justin, Andy and Iain) are going to be able to get together with Kris and Ashley to do some shows early next year. UK only at the moment, I’m afraid (but we are working it). There should be a details later this week.

Are you getting excited yet? Okay, so as I feared it appears to be “UK only at the moment,” but if this train really gets rolling, surely we can hope for a small smattering of U.S. dates that would bring them to some of their old familiar stomping grounds like Chicago, right? That’s what I’m hoping for.

Just having these guys back on the same stage would be enough for me….was it really 1996 when I last had the chance to see the band? Yep.

I did a short email interview with Justin around the time of his last solo album (The Great War) and spoke a bit about the Dels, including this bit:

Around the time that you were preparing What Is Love For for release, there was word that you also had an entire band album in the can recorded with Iain Harvie that you were trying to get label interest for. Whatever became of that material?

That is inaccurate. Iain and I have written an album’s worth of material in the intervening years but there is no band thing at all. We’re still working on it occasionally. It’s very good but we can’t see many fans of the Dels liking it. For that reason we’ll probably stick it out as Del Amitri just out of badness.

It’s hard to say what will come out of this forthcoming reunion, but I’m excited by the possibilities…

UPDATE: We now know a few more things, thanks to what appears to be a newly launched Del Amitri website:

Here’s a press release about the tour:

THE A TO Z OF US
With a cast of original members and even the original crew, Del Amitri return from a ten year sabbatical to wheel out every hit from every era of their lengthy recording career. Justin Currie and Iain Harvie will once again be joined on stage by Andy Alston, Kris Dollimore and Ashley Soan.

It’s been thirty years since Del Amitri’s debut single, ‘Sense Sickness’ – their contribution to all things early 80s and jangly. “The A to Z of Us will take a retrospective sweep of our entire output, from indie art-pop through folk-tinged balladry to hairy Brit-rock chuggery”, says front man Justin Currie.

Formed in Glasgow in 1983, during their distinguished career Del Amitri had four Top 10 albums and a string of memorable hit singles. Their million selling breakthrough album ‘Waking Hours’ (1989) included the hits ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ and ‘Kiss This Thing Goodbye’. The follow-up, 1992’s ‘Change Everything’, featured the massive radio single ‘Always The Last To Know’ and reached No.2 in the albums chart, only being held off the top slot by the might of ‘The Bodyguard’ soundtrack. 1995’s ‘Twisted’ charted at No.3 and included their biggest ever single ‘Roll To Me’, which reached No.10 on the Billboard Hot 100. Del Amitri’s most recent album was 2002’s ‘Can You Do Me Good?’, and the band have been on hiatus since finishing the subsequent tour.

“Whenever anyone asked if Del Amitri would ever re-form,” says guitarist Iain Harvie, “our standard response was ‘We never broke up – the phone just stopped ringing.’”

It has started ringing now and Del Amitri are picking it up from where they left off.

The initial tour dates are here.

I’ll leave you with Justin’s latest video from Lower Reaches, “Half of Me.”

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhycdyRbTbk”]