Luther Blissett

Luther Loide Blissett (born 1 February 1958) is a former professional footballer and manager who played for the England national team during the 1980s. Born in Jamaica, Blissett played as a striker, and is best known for his time at Watford, whom he helped win promotion from the Fourth Division to the First Division. As of 2010, Blissett holds Watford's all-time records for appearances and goals, having played 503 games and scored 186 goals.

Blissett's other clubs included A.C. Milan, who paid £1m for him in 1983 before selling him back to Watford for £550,000 in 1984, and A.F.C. Bournemouth, for whom he had a goals-to-games ratio of nearly one goal in every two appearances. Blissett was capped 14 times by England, scoring a hat-trick on his debut. After retiring from playing, Blissett turned to coaching, initially under the management of Graham Taylor at Watford, and managed Chesham United from 2006 until 2007.

Since the mid-1990s, Luther Blissett has frequently been used as a pseudonym, most notably by members of the Luther Blissett Project.

Luther Blissett (nom de plume)

Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open pop star" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994. The pseudonym first appeared in Bologna, Italy, in mid-1994, when a number of cultural activists began using it for staging a series of urban and media pranks and to experiment with new forms of authorship and identity. From Bologna the multiple-use name spread to other European cities, such as Rome and London, as well as countries such as Germany, Spain, and Slovenia. Sporadic appearances of Luther Blissett have been also noted in Canada, the United States, and Brazil.

For reasons that remain unknown, though according to one former member the decision was based purely on the perceived comic value of the name, the pseudonym was borrowed from a real-life Luther Blissett, a notable association football player, who played for A.C. Milan, Watford F.C. and England in the 1980s. In December 1999, the Italian activists who had launched the Luther Blissett Project in 1994 decided to discontinue usage of the name by committing symbolic ritual suicide, or seppuku. After authoring the best-selling historic novel Q as "Luther Blissett", five of them went on to found the writers' collective Wu Ming.