all-in-it-together girl-gang image". The Spice Girls' former vocal coach, Pepi Lemer, described their individual voices as distinct and easy to distinguish, citing the "lightness" of Bunton's voice and the "soulful sound" of Brown's and Chisholm's. Biographer Sean Smith cited Chisholm as the vocalist the group could not do without. Sinclair noted that while Chisholm's ad libs are a distinctive feature of certain Spice Girls songs, the difference in the amount of time her voice was featured over any other member was negligible. While vocal time was distributed equally, musicologist Nicola Dibben found that there was an "interesting inequality" in the way that vocal styles were distributed within the group, which she felt conformed to certain stereotypes associated with race and socioeconomic background. According to Dibben, most of the declamatory style of singing in the group's singles were performed by Brown, the only black member, and Chisholm, whom Dibben classified as white working class; this was in contrast to the more lyrical sections allotted to Beckham, whom Dibben classified as white middle class. Songwriting The Spice Girls did not play instruments, but co-wrote all of their songs. According to their frequent collaborator Richard Stannard, they had two approaches to songwriting: ballads were written in a traditional way with the group sitting around a piano, while songs such as "Wannabe" were the result of tapping into their "mad" energy. Eliot Kennedy, another regular co-writer, said that songwriting sessions with the Spice Girls were "very quick and short". He described his experience working with them: What I said to them was, "Look, I've got a chorus—check this out." And I'd sing them the chorus and the melody—no lyrics or anything—and straight away five pads and pencils came out and they were throwing lines at us. Ten minutes later, the song was written. Then you go through and refine it. Then later, as you were recording it you might change a few things here and there. But pretty much it was a real quick process. They were confident in what they were doing, throwing it out there. Absolute's Paul Wilson recalled an experience whereby he and Watkins were responsible for writing the backing track and the group would then write the lyrics. Watkins added: "I wasn't an 18-year-old girl. They always had this weird ability to come up with phrases that you'd never heard of." He said the members would create dance routines at