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As investigators tried to figure out what led 40-year-old Wade Michael Page to attack a Sikh gurdwara in suburban Milwaukee, media reports depicted him as a white supremacist who performed in a racist rock band.

The shaven-headed Page, whose tattoos included the Celtic cross adopted by white supremacist groups, had been the front man for a white-power rock band called End Apathy for several years, according to CNN.

Joining the army in 1992, Page was first trained as a mechanic for the Hawk anti-aircraft missile system, then as a psychological warfare specialist. He rose to the rank of sergeant before losing a stripe due to "patterns of misconduct".

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said an April 2010 interview that Page gave to promote End Apathy reveals a man who felt he was holding himself back when it came to accomplishing "positive result . . . in our sick society".

Along with five songs that were streaming on End Apathy's MySpace page until the page was deactivated late Monday afternoon, the interview offers insights into the army veteran, it said.

In the interview, conducted by "Rick 56" from End Apathy's record label Label 56 in Linthicum, Maryland, Page said he started the band in 2005 "to figure out what it would take to actually accomplish positive results in society and what is holding us back".

That sentiment, he says in the interview, inspired the songs "Self Destruct", "Useful Idiots", "Submission" and "Insignificant".

The Journal Sentinel also cited Southern Poverty Law Centre, a group that has studied hate crimes for decades, as reporting Monday that Page was a frustrated neo-Nazi.

Heidi Beirich, director of the centre's intelligence project, said her group had been tracking Page since 2000, when he tried to purchase goods from the National Alliance, a well-known hate group.

The National Alliance was led by William Pierce, who was the author of "The Turner Diaries". The book depicts a violent revolution in the US leading to an overthrow of the federal government and, ultimately, a race war.

Also Monday, a volunteer human-rights group called Responsible for Equality And Liberty, or R.E.A.L., found links between Page, his band and a white supremacist website called Stormfront.